872 Life poems

What the scale tells you is how much the earth has missed you, body, how it wants you back again after you leave it to go forth into the light. Do you remember how earth hardly noticed you then? Others would rock you in their arms, warm in the flow that fed you, coaxed you upright. Then earth began to claim you with spots and fevers, began to lick at you with a bruised knee, a bloody shin, and finally to stoke you, body, drumming intimate coded messages through music you danced to unawares, there in your dreaming and your poems and your obedient blood. Body, how useful you became, how lucky, heavy with news and breakage, rich, and sad, sometimes, imagining that greedy zero you must have been, that promising empty sack of possibilities, never-to-come tomorrow. But look at you now, body, soft old shoe that love wears when it’s stirring, look down, look how earth wants what you weigh, needs what you know.

What I expected, was Thunder, fighting, Long struggles with men And climbing. After continual straining I should grow strong; Then the rocks would shake And I rest long. What I had not foreseen Was the gradual day Weakening the will Leaking the brightness away, The lack of good to touch, The fading of body and soul Smoke before wind, Corrupt, unsubstantial. The wearing of Time, And the watching of cripples pass With limbs shaped like questions In their odd twist, The pulverous grief Melting the bones with pity, The sick falling from earth - These, I could not foresee. Expecting always Some brightness to hold in trust Some final innocence Exempt from dust, That, hanging solid, Would dangle through all Like the created poem, Or the faceted crystal.

how can I tell you baby, oh honey, you'll never know the ride the ride of a lowered chevy slithering through the blue dotted night along Riverside Drive Española poetry rides the wings of a ’59 Impala yes, it does and it points chrome antennae towards ’Burque stations rocking oldies Van Morrison brown eyed girls Creedence and a bad moon rising over Chimayo and I guess it also rides on muddy Subarus tuned into new-age radio on the frigid road to Taos on weekend ski trips yes, baby you and I are two kinds of wheels on the same road listen, listen to the lonesome humming of the tracks we leave behind

To be a good ex/current friend for R. To be one last inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship advice for L. To be advice for my mother. To be a more comfortable hospital bed for my mother. To be no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time, America for my uncle, who wants to be China for me. To be a country of trafficless roads & a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go fast. To be a cyclone of laughter when my parents say their new coworker is like that, they can tell because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t, can’t be one of them. To be the one my parents raised me to be— a season from the planet of planet-sized storms. To be a backpack of PB&J & every thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming their own storms. To be, for me, nobody, homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D & be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars, simple decoration for the new apartment with you. To be close, J., to everything that is close to you— blue blanket, red cup, green shoes with pink laces. To be the blue & the red. The green, the hot pink.

When you are not surprised, not surprised, nor leap in imagination from sunlight into shadow or from shadow into sunlight suiting the color of fright or delight to the bewildering circumstance when you are no longer surprised by the quiet or fury of daybreak the stormy uprush of the sun’s rage over the edges of torn trees torrents of living and dying flung upward and outward inward and downward to space or else peace peace peace peace the wood-thrush speaking his holy holy far hidden in the forest of the mind while slowly the limbs of light unwind and the world’s surface dreams again of night as the center dreams of light when you are not surprised by breath and breath and breath the first unconscious morning breath the tap of the bird’s beak on the pane and do not cry out come again blest blest that you are come again o light o sound o voice of bird o light and memory too o memory blest and curst with the debts of yesterday that would not stay, or stay when you are not surprised by death and death and death death of the bee in the daffodil death of color in the child’s cheek on the young mother’s breast death of sense of touch of sight death of delight and the inward death the inward turning night when the heart hardens itself with hate and indifference for hated self and beloved not-self when you are not surprised by wheel’s turn or turn of season the winged and orbed chariot tilt of time the halcyon pause, the blue caesura of spring and solar rhyme woven into the divinely remembered nest by the dark-eyed love in the oriole’s breast and the tides of space that ring the heart while still, while still, the wave of the invisible world breaks into consciousness in the mind of god then welcome death and be by death benignly welcomed and join again in the ceaseless know-nothing from which you awoke to the first surprise.

I. Sirs, in our youth you love the sight of us. Older, you fall in love with what we’ve seen, Would lose yourselves by living in our lives. I’ll spin you tales, play the Arabian girl; Working close, alone in the blond arena, Flourish my cape, the cloth on the camera. For women learn to be a holy show. I’ll tell you where I’ve been, not what I am: In Rotterdam, womb where my people sprang, I find my face, my father, everywhere. New cousins I must stoop to greet, the get Of tall, whey-colored burghers, sturdy dams, As children fed on tulip bulbs and dirt, Tugged at dry dugs and sucked at winter’s rind. My cousins, dwarfed by war! Your forms rebuke The butcher and the bystander alike. To ease you I can’t shrink this big Dutch frame Got of more comfortable ancestors. But from my Southern side I pluck a phrase, “I’ll carry you.” And it means “rest in me,” To hold you as I may, in my mind’s womb. But snap the album, get the guidebook out! Rotterdam: her raw, gray waterfront, Zadkine’s memorial burning on the quay; This bronze is mortal, gaping in defeat, The form that wombed it split to let it be. It mends; he lurches up, in blood reborn, The empty heavens his eternal frame. II. Move to my room beside the Golden Horn Where minarets strike fire against the sky. The architecture: breasts and phalluses. Where are the words to say that words are lies? Yeats lied. And here Byzantium lies dead. Constantinople? Syllables in a text. Istanbul. Real. Embalmed in dancing dust. Everywhere the dark-brown past gives way To the beige of progress, that wide vacant lot. Turkey without coffee! Endlessly we sip tea From bud vases, and I lust for the guide, A sultry, serious, pedantic boy In a tight brown suit, thirsting to get out Of the triple city weighing on his mind. Oh, he was doomed, doomed like the dogs On Dog Island, in the sea, Netted and dumped and exiled, left to die, Then skinned. We heard imaginary canine howls, Like the rustlings of a thousand gauzy girls, Film-eyed cattle, perishing of ennui In abandoned harems where he guided me. Meanwhile the Faithful, prostrate and intoning, Stare into the light as blind as death, Knowing for sure their end is instant Heaven. We Infidels concede them Paradise, Having seen heaven-as-harem, a eunuch God In charge: the virgin slowly fattening to blubber. Love, become feminized, tickles like a feather. The saints of Art? Sophia, that vast barn Holds no small Savior waiting to get born. The formal scribble on the assaulted walls— Five hundred years of crossing out His name! Some famous, glittering pebbles mark the place As God’s most grandiose sarcophagus. Decay, decay. And the mind, a fetus, dies. III. Return me to the airfield near Shanghai Where I am very young: shy, apprehensive, Seated like Sheba on a baggage mountain Waiting for the first adventure to begin. The train will glide through fields of rice and men, Bodies like thongs, and glorious genitals, Not alien as Chinese, but Adam-strange. Rejoiced by her first look at naked men, Her soul swims out the window of the train! She goes where newborn daughters clog the creeks; Bank-porticoes are strewn with starving rags. Here the old dragon, China, thrashes, dying. But the ancient, virile music of the race Is rising, drenched in gongs and howls of dogs Islanded, the sighs of walled-up women Dreaming of peasants in their prisoning fields… But we break out of the harem of history! No longer that young foreigner on the train, I listen like a bird, although I ruminate Like a cow, in my pale Holland body, riven By love and children. These eyes are what they see. Come die with me in the mosques of Rotterdam.

For John Guare I used to live in a mother now I live in a sunflower Blinded by the silverware Blinded by the refrigerator I sit on a sidewalk in the sunflower and its yellow downpour The light of  the world beads up on one perfect green leaf It scribbles its name on every living thing then erases it so what’s left is more of a whisper than a mother Here it’s spring Over and over and over again • I used to live in a cloud now I live in a crow It’s tiny and crippled in there but I can find my way to the bathroom in the dark if   I need to All the windows in the crow are left open and let the clouds in Back in They float past my bed and have nothing to say Hello it’s nice to meet you! From a telephone pole tongues slide out singing welcome home Welcome home they sing • I used to live in a tree now I live in a king He waves his arms in front of   him and endless migrations of   birds disappear into his coat I like to sit up inside his crown eating sandwiches and watching tv Hills shake in the distance when he shuffles his feet Floods when he snaps his fingers I bow inside his brow and the afternoon stretches out Orders more sandwiches And sells the slaves and sets the slaves free and sells the slaves

In a vintage boutique on Sullivan’s Quay, I lift a winter coat with narrow bodice, neat lapels, a fallen hem. It is far too expensive for me, but the handwritten label [1915] brings it to my chest in armfuls of red. In that year, someone drew a blade through a bolt of fabric and stitched this coat into being. I carry it to the dressing room, slip my arms in. Silk lining spills against my skin. I clasp the belt and draw a slow breath as a cramp curls again, where blood stirs and melts. In glass, I am wrapped in the weight of old red: red pinched into girl cheeks and smeared from torn knees, lipstick blotted on tissue, bitten lips, a rough kiss, all the red bled into pads and rags, the weight of red, the wait for red, that we share. In the mirror, the old coat blushes. This pocket may once have sheltered something precious — a necklace, a love letter, or a fresh egg, feather-warm, its shell brittle around a hidden inner glow, held loosely so it couldn’t crack, couldn’t leak through seams, so it couldn’t stain the dress within.

After a winter of gluttony & grief I'm back on plan for good this time. I’ve ballooned to a specific kind of ugly the kind you hope to hide with body spray. But it gets worse after a winter of gluttony & grief. I’ve shown up for meatballs. For lemons whipped to weeping. Now I land my balloon for the specific kind of ugly salad oil is. Happy date night, darling. Happy coconut water + nutritional yeast. After this winter of gluttony & grief spring comes, stabbing her hard stem of anger in the throat. Even garlic scapes are flat balloons, their ugliness specific as my penmanship: green tubes of spice & hate. My body speaks the ugly testament that took all winter. It says:Gluttony & grief balloon, darling. Only kindness is specific.

Whose voice to have called you And brought you to breathing So mute as you tarry, Enclosed in career? Whose thoughts aren’t like your thoughts But strips of bright Silver, bringing you constants On dead twisting paths Till words couldn’t keep you Collected in hours Advanced in a body Confused with the grass To show us by falling More reasons for leaving Thought’s office to leave you Asleep without fear