51 Imagination poems

We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead of the murky yellow of my upbringing. She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flower bed, her pantomimed banquet, phantom guests dining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses. Precisely, the lit up jackrabbits appear in peculiar blue candor under the stoplight dusk, pigeons hued reddish are garrulous and incomprehensible as drunks at the end of the cocktail hour. It’s that time in America when the air is overgrowth. The piquancy of coriander neighbors allowed to flower mingles with fragrances we douse our clothes-lined laundry in each week to cloister the body’s reeking. Truck smoke from the interstate. I’m out-of-doors, which is to say nature is hemmed in by doors, which is to say nature is a category of my making, and I can’t say why the skittish, black bugs flit into the house when there’s so much turf afforded them already, but tonight I’ll crush a few with a Newsweek before sleeping. Now, it’s that time in America in the out-of-doors beneath tree and trellis and vapor trails of overnight flights fare-thee-welling to London and Morocco. Brandy in soda water, a xylophone jingle of the ice, I sit in my Adirondack without my minute, Midwestern wife who Tuesday returns from her summit in Cleveland. It’s that time when I’m alone in America with my young daughter who startles herself realizing the woodpile beneath that black oak is itself formerly a tree, and she wants to know whether these trees have feelings. It’s this acquaintance with death she so improves upon annually. It’s in this precise moment in America that I realize this acquainting, this becoming familiar, this cordiality with death is the entire task of her growing older. Next year her ficus will die and the next year her minnow will die, and it’s in these moments in America when my daughter’s plump lip quivers in a preface to bawling, when I’m alone and can do too little, I say, I’m sorry life is too much, my love, I’m sorry my love, it isn’t enough.

He could not,no, he could not,no, although He wheedled and cajoled, begged and promised, But they would not,no, they would not Take him to see The Curse of Frankenstein. Then his uncle called and offered and they caved. So next it was the matinee then home And nothing said, until he sat through dinner like Some little diplomat, and after that excused himself And took his plate and headed up to bed. Still nothing said.No, but midnight he woke up screaming. Morning, his father cleared the plates then turned, “That’s that,” he summarized, “too anatomical.” “What’s anatomical?” the boy asked back. This was summer 1957. Monarchs foraged flowers, working colors With their yes-now-no-now light arrhythmias. By afternoon leaves shimmered in the heat, And in the evening intermittent waves Of fireflies telegraphed their kind While in the little deeps of darkened houses Window units swallowed oceans of air, Until the boy, deep in his house, slept hard enough That when he woke he couldn’t close his hands. “But what was anatomical?” he asked again. His father climbed a ladder to the attic where He bumped around then climbed back down Carrying an old foxed Gray’s Anatomy Packed full with illustrations, what seeing these The boy felt certain were the pictures of mixed meats. That night the windows purred, and nothing budged, Till breakfast brought another book, this time One on pathology, which meant more pictures plus Diseases, where the worst were best And came from “intimate contact.” “But what was intimate?” he later pestered, Till his father downed his drink and said, “That’s how you made your way into this world.” Mother rose and left the room. The boy sat silent; He sat there calmer than the noggin of a cat, Until he stretched and, yawning, mentioned that He might just go on up and get to bed. But secretly he understood; he knew For good-and-always that in fact His father wasn’t a serious man So he was on his own and had to make Sense out of things himself, even if Some sense went wrong, like Frankenstein’s, Who wasn’t a serious man either — And that was really that, even if it meant You’d sink one day without so much as SOS. Some nights that summer, sleepless, eyes pinned wide, He’d slip outdoors to watch his parents on the porch, Their cigarettes, their quiet talk, and then, For nothing he could tell, their laughter as His father fixed another round of drinks. And after that more laughter, like cicadas. The boy watched this, as now he sometimes drives The five miles out-of-way to see that house again. And, never-you-mind his knowing better, Sometimes just his doing this sets off Imaginings that he is standing in the kitchen Saying, “Oh my dear animal family, How I loved you. How richly we purred.” And sometimes too it sweeps back over him, His thinking that his father wasn’t a serious man. Those times, slowing the car, he says to himself, “Well then, you are not a serious man either.”

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light. (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Goaded and harassed in the factory That tears our life up into bits of days Ticked off upon a clock which never stays, Shredding our portion of Eternity, We break away at last, and steal the key Which hides a world empty of hours; ways Of space unroll, and Heaven overlays The leafy, sun-lit earth of Fantasy. Beyond the ilex shadow glares the sun, Scorching against the blue flame of the sky. Brown lily-pads lie heavy and supine Within a granite basin, under one The bronze-gold glimmer of a carp; and I Reach out my hand and pluck a nectarine.

Little Box talks back With a new set of teeth And pink gums A fake nose and a wax mustache She disguises her voice To sound like Groucho • Little Box opens up And cries to her psychiatrist I don’t know why they hate me I’m such a sweetheart I volunteer at the zoo And teach Mandarin To their bratty children

Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grain as if prepared for the path of  the spirit’s journey to the world of all souls. It is not an easy path. A dog stands at the opening constellation past the great helping hand. The dog wants to know, did you ever harm an animal, hurt any creature, did you take a life you didn’t eat? This is the first on your map. There is another my people made of  the great beyond that lies farther away than this galaxy. It is a world that can’t be imagined by ordinary means. After this first one, the next could be a map of  forever. It could be a cartography shining only at some times of  the year like a great web of finery some spider pulled from herself to help you recall your true following your first white breath in the cold. The next door opens and Old Woman counts your scars. She is interested in how you have been hurt and not in anything akin to sin. From between stars are the words we now refuse; loneliness, longing, whatever suffering might follow your life into the sky. Once those are gone, the life you had against your own will, the hope, even the prayers take you one more bend around the river of sky.

—Hoooooooo Lay in an array of pixels Fat, simulated proteins Looks just like nutrition! Acts just like an avatar! I just wanted to give my body to A net of guarine Gingko-balboa azatine melamine Camphobacter phylacter nicotine Which hung like neuron-nectar in a cell, net of Vatic coughdropped hairball tells the future of Neural center where the straight lines hopped Like a hairline fracture on a bender jumps a Mulholland retaining wall and crashes the crinkled Vale of Food-for-thought Fruit for monkeys in a barrel, one fruit per monkey For a total of fortyseven monkeydays For a total of twelve hours at a clip The go-home-and-feed-the-baby milk of it That man is a mouth chased by ghosts Round a rainslicked hairpin off a cliff in (And now I pause to remember How Art was a silver paper moulded to the ceiling Where you cut your hair For your rebirth as Fata Androgyana The scissors-sister who slits where she goes-into Cuts as she cuts—) This machine makes its need louder and Invites me into its duct, unlike the baby Sleeping on the other edge of Pow’r, Eyes roll’d, mouth pinch’d shut Round Pow’r’s earthly sinks and shunts—

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean; And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

From breakfast on through all the day At home among my friends I stay, But every night I go abroad Afar into the land of Nod. All by myself I have to go, With none to tell me what to do — All alone beside the streams And up the mountain-sides of dreams. The strangest things are there for me, Both things to eat and things to see, And many frightening sights abroad Till morning in the land of Nod. Try as I like to find the way, I never can get back by day, Nor can remember plain and clear The curious music that I hear.

Growing up, I barely knew the Bible, but read and reread the part when Cain drifted east or was drawn that way, into a place of desolation, the land of Nod, there to begin, with a wife of unknown origin, another race of men, under the mark of God. As a boy, I thought Nod would be a place where the blue scillas would bloom gray, a country of the rack and screw, the serrated sword, where the very serving cups were bone. As a grown man, I’ve heard that Nod never was a nation—of Cain’s offspring, or anyone— but a mistranslation of “wander,” so Cain could go wherever, and be in Nod. Far more than in God, I believe in Cain, who destroyed his own brother, and therefore in any city could have his wish, and be alone.