872 Life poems

I hardly know where to look anymore. Places have a putrid familiarity like the smell of my own sheets or the close air of the kitchen — fishbones on the drain left in the ghastly order of temporal things. I have been sitting in this bar for years now the beer is stale, the wine off-color the music is always the same, old, sad songs that get older no better than endless conversation night after forgotten night when all I or you can recall is the dark, the traffic lights, the bartender's comments about drunk women in public places. I would like to go home finally, down the long streets north and south crossed with small gold leaves; I forget just where the hell anything is. Locked out.

Curled up in bed, I’m young in the old way. • One continuous stroke without lifting the pen as if “stem, tendril, stem tendril” were the words of a commandment. • My next elliptical loops read “Praise.” Word deciphered at a snail’s pace.

A little loam and topsoil is a lot. —Heather McHugh A vacant lot, maybe, but even such lit vacancy as interstate motels announce can look, well, pretty damned inviting after a long day’s drive, especially if the day has been oppressed by manic truckers, detours, endless road construction. And this poorly measured, semi- rectangle, projected and plotted with the familiar little flags upon a spread of neglected terra firma also offers brief apprehension, which—let’s face it, whether pleasing or encumbered by anxiety—dwells luxuriously in potential. Me? Well, I like a little space between shopping malls, and while this one may never come to be much of a garden, once we rip the old tires from the brambles and bag the trash, we might just glimpse the lot we meant, the lot we hoped to find.

A personal lens: glass bending rays That gave one that day’s news Saying each and every day, Just remember you are standing On a planet that’s evolving. How beautiful, she thought, what distance does For water, the view from above or afar. In last night’s dream, they were back again At the beginning. She was a child And he was a child. A plane lit down and left her there. Cold whitening the white sky whiter. Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world To be a sea.

I Swing by starwhite bones and Lights tick in the middle. Blue and white steel Black and white People hurrying along the wall. ”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“ Curve behind the sun again Towers full of ice. Rich Glass houses, “Here, Have a little of my blood,” Rich people!” Wheat in towers. Meat on ice. Cattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls. Baseball between these sudden tracks. Yell past the red street— Have you any water to drink, City? Rich glass buildings, give us milk! Give us coffee! Give us rum! There are huge clouds all over the sky. River smells of gasoline. Cars after cars after cars, and then A little yellow street goes by without a murmur. There came a man (”Those are radios, that were his eyes“) Who offered to sell us his bones. Swing by starwhite buildings and Lights come to life with a sound Of bugs under the dead rib. Miles of it. Still the same city. II Do you know where you are going? Do you know whom you must meet? Fortune, perhaps, or good news Or the doctor, or the ladies In the long bookstore, The angry man in the milkbar The drunkard under the clock. Fortune, perhaps, or wonder Or, perhaps, death. In any case, our tracks Are aimed at a working horizon. The buildings, turning twice about the sun, Settle in their respective positions. Centered in its own incurable discontent, the City Consents to be recognized. III Then people come out into the light of afternoon, Covered all over with black powder, And begin to attack one another with statements Or to ignore one another with horror. Customs have not changed. Young men full of coffee and Old women with medicine under their skin Are all approaching death at twenty miles an hour. Everywhere there is optimism without love And pessimism without understanding, They who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts Cannot agree to be at peace With their own images, shadowing them in windows From store to store. IV Until the lights come on with a swagger of frauds And savage ferns, The brown-eyed daughters of ravens, Sing in the lucky doors While night comes down the street like the millennium Wrapping the houses in dark feathers Soothing the town with a sign Healing the strong wings of sunstroke. Then the wind of an easy river wipes the flies Off my Kentucky collarbone. The claws of the treacherous stars Renegade drums of wood Endure the heavenward protest. Their music heaves and hides. Rain and foam and oil Make sabbaths for our wounds. (Come, come, let all come home!) The summer sighs, and runs. My broken bird is under the whole town, My cross is for the gypsies I am leaving And there are real fountains under the floor. V Branches baptize our faces with silver Where the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills. Winds at last possess our empty country There, there under the moon In parabolas of milk and iron The ghosts of historical men (Figures of sorrow and dust) Weep along the hills like turpentine. And seas of flowering tobacco Surround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.

Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it. Emily Dickinson It wasn't bliss. What was bliss but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours in patter, moving through whole days touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite housekeeping in a charmed world. And yet there was always more of the same, all that happiness, the aimless Being There. So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor, lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror. He was off cataloging the universe, probably, pretending he could organize what was clearly someone else's chaos. That's when she found the tree, the dark, crabbed branches bearing up such speechless bounty, she knew without being told this was forbidden. It wasn't a question of ownership— who could lay claim to such maddening perfection? And there was no voice in her head, no whispered intelligence lurking in the leaves—just an ache that grew until she knew she'd already lost everything except desire, the red heft of it warming her outstretched palm.

He stood up suddenly and threw himself and his grey canvas sack to the bus's floor, then, clutching the sack's edges, he struck the floor with it again, four or five times, then stopped. No one moved, everyone had moved for a moment, away from him as he had struck the floor. He sat looking at the contents of the bag, now strewn all over. Cassetts, broken cassette cases, assorted papers, and pieces of his old cassette recorder. He sat quite still for a moment. Whatever had been happening wasn't happening anymore. Nothing continued to happen, then something began to happen again. He began to pick up his things, put them into the sack. No one moved. They all looked at him, or they all tried not to look at him. He put his things into the sack with steadily increasing speed.

I have been taught never to brag but now I cannot help it: I keep a beautiful garden, all abundance, indiscriminate, pulling itself from the stubborn earth: does it offend you to watch me working in it, touching my hands to the greening tips or tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild the living and the dead both snap off in my hands? The neighbor with his stuttering fingers, the neighbor with his broken love: each comes up my drive to receive his pitying, accustomed consolations, watches me work in silence awhile, rises in anger, walks back. Does it offend them to watch me not mourning with them but working fitfully, fruitlessly, working the way the bees work, which is to say by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure? I can stand for hours among the sweet narcissus, silent as a point of bone. I can wait longer than sadness. I can wait longer than your grief. It is such a small thing to be proud of, a garden. Today there were scrub jays, quail, a woodpecker knocking at the white- and-black shapes of trees, and someone’s lost rabbit scratching under the barberry: is it indiscriminate? Should it shrink back, wither, and expurgate? Should I, too, not be loved? It is only a little time, a little space. Why not watch the grasses take up their colors in a rush like a stream of kerosene being lit? If I could not have made this garden beautiful I wouldn’t understand your suffering, nor care for each the same, inflamed way. I would have to stay only like the bees, beyond consciousness, beyond self-reproach, fingers dug down hard into stone, and growing nothing. There is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments. I want to take my neighbors into the garden and show them: Here is consolation. Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops around the sparrows as they fight. It lives alongside their misery. It glows each evening with a violent light.

After César Vallejo The fury that breaks a grown-up into kids, a kid into scattered birds and a bird into limp eggs, the fury of the poor takes one part oil to two parts vinegar. The fury that breaks a tree into leaves, a leaf into deranged flowers and a flower into wilting telescopes, the fury of the poor gushes two rivers against a hundred seas. The fury that breaks the true into doubts, doubt into three matching arches and the arch into instant tombs, the fury of the poor draws a sharpening stone against two knives. The fury that breaks the soul into bodies, the body into warped organs, and the organ into eight doctrines, the fury of the poor burns with one fire in two thousand craters.

Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home: Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine. Long through thy weary crowds I roam; A river-ark on the ocean brine, Long I've been tossed like the driven foam; But now, proud world! I'm going home. Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face; To Grandeur with his wise grimace; To upstart Wealth's averted eye; To supple Office, low and high; To crowded halls, to court and street; To frozen hearts and hasting feet; To those who go, and those who come; Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home. I am going to my own hearth-stone, Bosomed in yon green hills alone, — A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; Where arches green, the livelong day, Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod A spot that is sacred to thought and God. O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?