51 Imagination poems

What half-blind is like: like two microscopes in my head each with differently stuck objectives. They enable the small and the very small and reduce everything else to blur and shade. Yet you can train even this. Train it to spot the shape of sharks’ teeth, of which there are many samples and many shapes but not as many as flecks of sand, pieces of shell. I have hundreds plucked from the shore. But in the same beach I buried a toy and never found it again. A tiny toy: articulate, a translucent man, a smallness to whom the world was an unbounded wonder. Blemished and damaged I would hold him up and say He is broken and anyone who could see would say He looks fine to me. But they can see well, not finely. Look at his face, etched and serrated by that gargantuan saw. The cracked shell of his translucent skin, buried in rubble now, and those teeth, all that remain of terrible and invisible jaws.

Inventing a horse is not easy. One must not only think of the horse. One must dig fence posts around him. One must include a place where horses like to live; or do when they live with humans like you. Slowly, you must walk him in the cold; feed him bran mash, apples; accustom him to the harness; holding in mind even when you are tired harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun; one must imagine teaching him to run among the knuckles of tree roots, not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves, and not to grow thin in the city, where at some point you will have to live; and one must imagine the absence of money. Most of all, though: the living weight, the sound of his feet on the needles, and, since he is heavy, and real, and sometimes tired after a run down the river with a light whip at his side, one must imagine love in the mind that does not know love, an animal mind, a love that does not depend on your image of it, your understanding of it; indifferent to all that it lacks: a muzzle and two black eyes looking the day away, a field empty of everything but witchgrass, fluent trees, and some piles of hay.

La poesie vit d’insomnie perpetuelle —René Char There’s a sickness in me. During the night I wake up & it’s brought a stain into my mouth, as if an ocean has risen & left back a stink on the rocks of my teeth. I stink. My mouth is ugly, human stink. A color like rust is in me. I can’t get rid of it. It rises after I brush my teeth, a taste like iron. In the night, left like a dream, a caustic light washing over the insides of me. * What to do with my arms? They coil out of my body like snakes. They branch & spit. I want to shake myself until they fall like withered roots; until they bend the right way— until I fit in them, or they in me. I have to lay them down as carefully as an old wedding dress, I have to fold them like the arms of someone dead. The house is quiet; all night I struggle. All because of my arms, which have no peace! * I’m a martyr, a girl who’s been dead two thousand years. I turn on my left side, like one comfortable after a long, hard death. The angels look down tenderly. “She’s sleeping,” they say & pass me by. But all night, I am passing in & out of my body on my naked feet. * I’m awake when I’m sleeping & I’m sleeping when I’m awake, & no one knows, not even me, for my eyes are closed to myself. I think I am thinking I see a man beside me, & he thinks in his sleep that I’m awake writing. I hear a pen scratch a paper. There is some idea I think is clever: I want to capture myself in a book. * I have to make a place for my body in my body. I’m like a dog pawing a blanket on the floor. I have to turn & twist myself like a rag until I can smell myself in myself. I’m sweating; the water is pouring out of me like silver. I put my head in the crook of my arm like a brilliant moon. * The bones of my left foot are too heavy on the bones of my right. They lie still for a little while, sleeping, but soon they bruise each other like angry twins. Then the bones of my right foot command the bones of my left to climb down.

So I'm an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach thing no song sing but in the word which I'm starlessly unreachably faithful you, pedant & you, politically righteous & you, alive you think you can peal my sober word apart from my drunken word my Buddhist word apart from my white sugar Thérèse word my word to comrade from my word to my mother but all my words are one word my lives one my last to first wound round in finally fiberless crystalline skein I began as a drunkard & ended as a child I began as an ordinary cruel lover & ended as a boy who read radiant newsprint I began physically embarrassing—"bloated"—& ended as a perfect black-haired laddy I began unnaturally subservient to my mother & ended in the crib of her goldenness I began in a fatal hemorrhage & ended in a tiny love's body perfect smallest one But I began in a word & I ended in a word & I know that word better Than any knows me or knows that word, probably, but I only asked to know it— That word is the word when I say me bloated & when I say me manly it's The word that word I write perfectly lovingly one & one after the other one But you—you can only take it when it's that one & not some other one Or you say "he lost it" as if I (I so nothinged) could ever lose the word But when there's only one word—when you know them, the words— The words are all only one word the perfect word— My body my alcohol my pain my death are only the perfect word as I Tell it to you, poor sweet categorizers Listen Every me I was & wrote were only & all (gently) That one perfect word

After eighteen years there’s no real grief left for the man who was my father. I hardly think of him anymore, and those dreams I used to have, in which he’d be standing in a room of people I didn’t know—maybe his new friends, if the dead have friendships— those dreams no longer trouble my sleep. He’s not in the crooked houses I wander through or in the field by the highway where I’m running, chasing down some important piece of paper, desperate to reach it as it’s lifted in the wake of trucks or flattened and marked by passing cars, as it’s lifted again to swirl over a broken wood fence. I don’t know why the paper’s so important, or if anything is even written there. I don’t know where the dead go, or why it’s good to forget them, not to see them if they come crowding the windows or trying to lay themselves down and press along our bodies at night and ask that we love them again, that our sorrows include them once more. This morning I couldn’t get up. I slept late, I dreamed of the single sheet of paper, which I never managed to reach as it stuttered and soared over the grass and a few flowers, so that I woke with a sense of loss, wondering who or what I had to mourn besides my father, whom I no longer mourn, father buried in the earth beneath grass, beneath flowers I trample as I run.

In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away, Whither and why I know not nor do I care. And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter, And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air. In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye, And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink, I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going, I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think.

You dweller in the dark cabin, To whom the watermelon is always purple, Whose garden is wind and moon, Of the two dreams, night and day, What lover, what dreamer, would choose The one obscured by sleep? Here is the plantain by your door And the best cock of red feather That crew before the clocks. A feme may come, leaf-green, Whose coming may give revel Beyond revelries of sleep, Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail, So that the sun may speckle, While it creaks hail. You dweller in the dark cabin, Rise, since rising will not waken, And hail, cry hail, cry hail.

“Crawl in,” said the witch, “and see if it’s hot enough to put the bread in.” —Hansel and Gretel All roads lead to rooms. —Irish Proverb a stark Quake a numb Calm * clutching my Crumbl ejumble among Tombs and in Caves my Dream Vision Oarsman, oarsman, Where have you been? I’ve been to Leafy, I’ve dismembered the Queen. Oarsman, oarsman What did you there? I hid in a cleft, I braided the air. hearing our oars where their freed goatsteps sped and are silent by an extinct river O Babylon when I lay down alert for sliding cataracts where in corridors the print of dancing feet beyond poise I am prey posing in snow-light being of human form clothed in the scales of a fish Count him a magician he controls the storm walked on the sea shouting that he is the Logos of God that he is the Word original and first begotten attended by power upheld by his mother (a very active gesturing baby) what if Simon Peter Jesus himself walked among the cold stone faces shouting NIKA emptyeyed blanksmiling Swiftness divination these false gods their commerce is the cloud so they can learn what is preparing in the sky Artificer of the universe Magician who controls the storm to see you in one spot I count the clouds others count the seasons Dreaming of archipelagos and the desert I have lived through weeks of years I have raked up fallen leaves for winter after winter across an empire of icy light Light of our dark is the fruit of my womb or night falling through the reign of splashes Liquid light that bathes the landscape in my figure Clairvoyant Ireland eras and eras encircled by sea the barrows of my ancestors have spilled their bones across the singing ear in hear or shell as wreck or wrack may be in daring There were giants on the earth in those days feasts then on hill and fort All night the borders of my bed carve paths across my face and I always forget to leave my address frightened by the way that midnight grips my palm and tells me that my lines are slipping out of question Divorce I manumission round with a gentle blow the casting branch my right hand My covenant was garment concealed or mask or matron Proceed with measured step the field and action of the law Like day the tables twelve whip torch and radiate halo Sky brewing coming storm Faraway over the hill when Hell was harrowed and earth was brought to heel how the hills spread away how the walls crumbled deathcolored frozen in time Where was the senate   zone and horizon Where are the people   mountain of light to the east Tell them I sail for the deep sea rest a painless extraction a joyful day bird of passage over all I love Goodbye to all the little fir trees of the future far   off    in    the    dread blindness    I   heard   light eagerly   I   struck   my foot against    a      stone      and raised    a    din    at    the sound    the   blessed    Paul shut   the   door   which   had been   open   and   bolted   it

Framed by our window, skaters, winding in and out the wind, as water reeling so kept in motion, on a well-honed edge spin out a gilded ceiling. Fish, reflecting glow for glow, saints around the sun, are frozen with amazement just one pane below. Skates flash like stars, so madly whirling one can hardly tell which is sky and which the watery floor ... one night two straitlaced couples, a footman over them, rode out in a dappled-horse-drawn sleigh onto the river, a moonlit lark. The ice broke and they—sleigh, footman and all—riding in state, rode straight on into the lidded water. That winter all winter folks twirled over them who—framed in lace, frost the furs, the shiny harness and their smiles the fire that keeps the place—sat benignly watching. “One foot out, one foot in, are we real,” thought one, “we who wander sheepishly in dreams, or they, the really sleepless eyes, under us? And every night who knows (a laughter troubles us like dreams) who skates (a thousand watch fires the stars) above, peering through the pane?”

Growing a bear — a midnight occupation, the need for which you perhaps first realized when you saw the wrong kind of shadow under your chin — a convex when you expected concave, so now it’s clear you’re getting older. Your wife was in the shower and you wanted to step inside and soap her up like you did in college when she said “I’ll shower with you, but I’m leaving my underwear on,” and you enjoyed her in every way you could enjoy a person with soap. You didn’t join your wife in the shower. She’s gotten funny about letting you see her shave her legs or wash herself anywhere. You think she read it somewhere — that letting your husband see you pluck anything, trim anything, apply medicine to anything, will make him feel like he’s furniture. It’s exactly on cold nights like these that the basement is not as forbidding as it should be, despite the fact that you have to put gloves on in what is part of  your own home. Downstairs, a large bathtub, kept, for some reason, after remodeling. It is there that your bear will be grown, by you, though you have no idea how. Probably wishing is most of it; fertilizer, chunks of raw stew meat, handfuls of  blackberries, two metal rakes, and a thick rug make up the rest. Then water. You get an e-mail from a friend late at night saying he can’t sleep. You write back “I hope you feel sleepy soon” and think how childish the word “sleepy” is. And you’re a man, older than most of  the people you see on television. You haven’t even considered how your wife will feel when you have finished growing your bear. You could write a letter to her tonight, explaining how your life was just so lacking in bear: “Janet, it’s nothing you’ve done — clearly you have no possible way of supplying me with a bear or any of the activities I might be able to enjoy after acquiring the bear.” It might just be best to keep the two worlds separate. Janet clearly prefers things to be comfortable and unchallenging. Janet soaps herself up. Janet puts herself to bed, and you just happen to be next to her. You go on your weekly bike ride with Mark and tell him that you’ve been growing a bear. An eighteen-wheeler flies by and he doesn’t seem to hear you — plus he’s focused on the hill. You think about how not all friends know what each other sounds like when struggling and breathing heavy. Past the age of college athletics, most friends don’t even know what each others’ bodies look like, flushed, tired, showering, cold.