873 Life poems

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

This was a true happening but (as you will see shortly) not such as would ready me for future ones. What has brisk disaster to do with a leisurely ordeal? Neither event, as you will notice also, has made me an understanding man. It was my watch one night, away then on the sea, when leaning on a couple of crates of something I dreamed of nothing special into the dark, and whispered the smoke of a sugared native product into the dark. Then from behind a quick rush burst not six feet over me with a sawing and then a cracking sound, and the other watch pointed up where a black squall ran port-side into the distance and a six by six crate lid veered and disappeared like a gull. But the other time we were idle ashore for days somewhere there are sandy foothills and small plains with weeds that stand like birds, and there was a steady blow on land that left off out at sea, leaving us all peculiar if I remember. The wind rasped the dense whorls of sharp leaves low on the ground and shrilled through the heads on the tall seed-stalks, and all those days the sound rose until we, without hope, without breath bore the conviction that our sojourn had not begun and had no end, like a period of dissipation. In certain Spanish havens the beggars come to you saying “Give me an amount. God will make it good.” Had they been wise those ladies would have said something of that kind and proffered a gratifying smile to their junior treasurer the other Tuesday and maybe been spared a peculiar fall. For forgetting their cards or missing dues or due to rancor from a month of planning they were turned away from the luncheon which might have saved them through its regular plaudits and calls to order. Instead they turned immediately back after some while waiting with other members in vying groups where the sound rose and narrowed, and from the dim hushed hall those five ladies, my individual patrons, came across the park together, under a hefty sun, under slight muffling rain, to my teashop. I worked on a cruising vessel one season and saw a woman being led below about a minute after she had vaulted the rail, and now her face cluttered with casts of hair returned to me, and a suggestion of the odor of moist wool. Then, after ordering, over the tinkle of service, the ladies called me and began the question of a particular person none had touched, wondering by turns in words like these: “Maybe when he was a child he went alone one night along the lakeside or followed streams in the dark and mating mayflies swarmed him or he was caught by a swirl of slippery animals risen from rotted cresses. It could be too a bird’s egg fell on him, that red and yellow spattering his coat showed him the partial form of brain and bill and wings like candy arms.” A second lady established the problem but in studious and in idle terms: “He must have tried becoming a sphere once when something hurt and must have failed. He is a cylinder and lacking the perfected self-containment of the sphere he nonetheless has beauty and though incomplete is unassailable.” The third advanced the first with this addition: “Maybe when he was a child and a good half he planted a happy garden for himself and tried to bring a boyish girl inside to share his secrets he could not bestow.” The fourth supposed some more years and less hope and figured on effects of disaffection: “Perhaps it was a time sprouting potatoes came creeping like things of the undersea surrounding him that gave him the first fevered turn toward what we now call his fine beauty.” The last lady came near to reconciling them: “Some awareness certainly shook him unawares once and he flinched and flinching has made him beautiful to all of us who admire huge eyed skittishness, the fawn standing some steps off always awkward and desired.” Odd gulls often join before a gale to bank and shrill in company, then at the heavy time of it they hush and float broadcast. Those ladies did the same the other Tuesday. Hopeless and breathless, both I and they rode like sitting birds into a last lull, and I was not (as you have seen) prepared by quick calamities of ocean labor for land bound suffering at ease. Understanding or unconcern could serve but pain and malice won, and who may be forgiven even his shapeless victories? “The boy is never by himself,” I said, “but by him stands an unseen friend whose face came in the petal fall under a secret tree, who meets his vague eyes with beaming gaps and his remote grin with a long lipless smile.”

Because a black bird flew across the road; Because the attendant at the pump turned surly; Because the uncertain weather Made Mother nervous, And, back home, the telephone kept ringing In an empty house; Because a white bird flew across the road. How far had they come? How far did they go? Seeing, along river after river, Between shores of brush and willow, Only the bend ahead and the bend behind Under a sky featureless and hard As a shallow bowl; through tautologies Of a landscape unendingly repeated Mile after mile; down Main Street After Main Street, replications Of the same petty civic scenery; Hearing the ghosts of trains Crossing between cornfields, Clattering over the points, moaning Above creosote and cinders, As if the imagination Could produce nothing more Than the same landscape, cornfields, Rivers, and Main Streets Pulling them, like a magnet, not toward But away from , not into the future, But away from the past; Until a white bird flew across the road With its mysterious message, that said to some, “Turn back,” and to the rest, “Go on.”

In the huddle you said “Go long—get open” and at the snap I took off along the right sideline and then cut across left in a long arc and I’m sure I was open at several points— glancing back I saw you pump-fake more than once but you must not have been satisfied with what you saw downfield and then I got bumped off course and my hands touched the turf but I regained my balance and dashed back to the right I think or maybe first left and then right and I definitely got open but the throw never came— maybe you thought I couldn’t hang on to a ball flung so far or maybe you actually can’t throw so far but in any case I feel quite open now, the defenders don’t seem too interested in me I sense only open air all around me though the air is getting darker and it would appear by now we’re well into the fourth quarter and I strongly doubt we can afford to settle for dinky little first downs if the score is what I think it is so come on, star boy, fling a Hail Mary with a dream-coached combination of muscle and faith and I will gauge the arc and I will not be stupidly frantic and I will time my jump and—I’m just going to say in the cool gloaming of this weirdly long game it is not impossible that I will make the catch.

Maker-of-sevens in the scheme of things From earth to star; Thy cycle holds whatever is fate, and Over the border the bar. Though rank and fierce the mariner Sailing the seven seas, He prays, as he holds his glass to his eyes, Coaxing the Pleiades. I cannot love them; and I feel your glad Chiding from the grave, That my all was only worth at all, what Joy to you it gave. These seven links the Law compelled For the human chain— I cannot love them; and you, oh, Seven-fold months in Flanders slain! A jungle there, a cave here, bred six And a million years, Sure and strong, mate for mate, such Love as culture fears; I gave you clear the oil and wine; You saved me your hob and hearth— See how even life may be ere the Sickle comes and leaves a swath. But I can wait the seven of moons, Or years I spare, Hoarding the heart’s plenty, nor spend A drop, nor share— So long but outlives a smile and A silken gown; Then gaily I reach up from my shroud, And you, glory-clad, reach down.

Drunk on the Umbrian hills at dusk and drunk On one pink cloud that stood beside the moon, Drunk on the moon, a marble smile, and drunk, Two young Americans, on one another, Far from home and wanting this forever— Who needed God? We had our bodies, bread, And glasses of a raw, green, local wine, And watched our Godless perfect darkness breed Enormous softly burning ancient stars. Who needed God? And why do I ask now? Because I’m older and I think God stirs In details that keep bringing back that time, Details that are just as vivid now— Our bodies, bread, a sharp Umbrian wine.

The story is written, the slip of a girl is loosed And her life folds over. Against the cold, the waiting For the what will happen. The next. Wonderful Awful. The blonde in a chemical bath. The story keeps on being written As a woman who waits for never to happen As an empty wall waits for light to form a bridge And under it, a mass of open eyes, Waiting for the awful eventual. Now? And yes is what is said. Then here it is, the box We live in where the crazy face of the day looks back At the closed eye of the night looking in. A boy of four comes in as an example Of where the door of life is left open for a moment. Time tumbles hour after hour until it's morning again. Some glass is for looking through, some is for seeing back. Every outline is a cage one way or another.

It’s the way they cannot understand the window they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take a wrong turn at my door and end up thus in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity, cruising the room until they find themselves smack up against it and they cannot fathom how the air has hardened and the world they know with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there with all they want just in front of them, they must fling their bodies against the one unalterable law of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on making the sound that tethers their electric fury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting in it.

You slow down to watch cumulus clouds stream across the sky. You choose a more circuitous route home and pass a tree with white bags tied around random apples. The apples remind you of clouds, how each hangs in the sky, singular yet part of a flock. Each item in the flock is a coordinate of earth and sky, enumerating space. The flocks of apples and clouds are actual infinities, an endless collection of discrete items that one can conceivably count to the end. This is different from potential infinity, which is the entirety of infinity, an immeasurable continuum that is greater than the sum of its parts. After your first glimpse, you are lonely for more contraction of space around the light of your mind contemplating what cannot be conceived. What cannot be conceived this morning? The Army has found the larynx of an Iraqi man that American soldiers slowly strangled to death. His ribs, additional evidence for the trial, are still missing. They are in a refrigerator in Washington, D.C. These are discrete items; whereas how the passage of time felt as the soldiers strangled him is a continuum of infinite pain. And his words and songs and prayers and curses he will never speak are an empty set.