872 Life poems

And all this while I have been playing with toys A toy power station a toy automobile a house of blocks And all this while far off in other lands Thousands and thousands, millions and millions— You know—you see the pictures Women carrying their bony infants Men sobbing over graves Buildings sculpted by explosion Earth wasted bare and rotten— And all this while I have been shopping, I have Been let us say free And do they hate me for it Do they hate me

As this suburban summer wanders toward dark cats watch from their driveways — they are bored and await miracles. The houses show, through windows flashes of knife and fork, the blue light of televisions, inconsequential fights between wife and husband in the guest bathroom voices sound like echoes in these streets the chattering of awful boys as they plot behind the juniper and ivy, miniature guerillas that mimic the ancient news of the world and shout threats, piped high across mock fences to girls riding by in the last pieces of light

For Arthur Sze (Qin) Dim Sum equivalent to:dot, speck heart. Stone piled on stone I finish my meal. In this early sunrise I see shadows where a cairn of rocks used to stack in the direction of eastern light. In late morning, I lit red candles and placed them next to a three-hinged mirror, as a way of seeing shadows of shadows. Milkweed grows on the side of the road in ditches, reminiscent of professors’ soft words, amazing the brilliant contemplation and thought pattern as you learn, slowly. In my body neuron-zipped words and more words. My lexicon building from nothing to something good. Embossed tattoos like small notes on sheet music. Dots and lines, strands and strings I rest on the note D, increased by one half as my orchestra director signals, dashes and spaces for letters as grace notes in Morse code. Notes in staccato igniting instrumental waves of burning wood, a fiery spark over and speck dust played in harmonics, as a coot hovers over a brook dives in comes back with a fish. No one would ever know its true beauty and calmness, the setting sun across an arctic lake, unless it is witnessed. As speckled day owls, brants, and mergansers float in the sunset. To learn you must be open, diligent, and willing to be an individual. 11,000 murres with webbed feet land also without any fear of predators. But still, on the page grow spotted mushrooms and morels. Examine the distortion and effects of the warming earth. The change of the ice age with purpose as the warming earth today, but I take heart in sun along with the core of a gingko tree’s light.

The sunlight almost unfaceable, and weightless, and the gravities, wind-flickers, shadows, the ripped black places crows make on the phone poles— how to keep your own counsel, even against the little stabs, the winds and chromes— • Various flashes, the office door, a supper glass, a last smear of streetlight on the bedsheets. Nothing. On into the soaring, black release. • The messages say syllabus and vetting that and will be absent. Nothing. On into the what? the air you’re gliding on or falling from, the wind of it making ahs and salves in the hollow of your chest, Celina of a bodily sibilance like willows, of the shimmering, midsummer glance. You would allow yourself a message. How to make it low-key. How to keep it to a few lines. • On into the wind of whatever is happening. What leashes you seems to have come undone. You lean down into the white heap of black words. You pad out toward the water fountain into someone’s eyeshadowed look, the lush backwash of her skirt. You weigh maybe three or four ounces, swirling down the stairwell in whichever wind this is, your ribs aching with what they sing so shamelessly.

There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals? Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers, apt at the essential such as rearranging languages. They occur from route to route like savages who wear shells. “I cannot place him.” Yet I do. He must ascend indefinitely as airs he must regard his image as plastic, adhering to the easeful carpet that needs footprints and cares for them as is their wont in houses, the ones we pass by. Such a day/or such a night reeling from cabin to cabin looking at the cakewalk or merely dancing. These adventures in broad/or slim lamplight, Yet the cars do not cheat, even their colors perform in storm. We never feel the scratch, they do. When lightning strikes it’s safer to ride on rubber going down a mountain, safer than trees, or sand, more preventive to be hid in a cloud we sing, remembering The old manse and robins. One tear, a salty one knowing we have escaped the charm of being native. Even as your glance through the windshield tells me you’ve seen another mishap of nature you would willingly forget, prefer to be like him near the hearth where woodsmoke makes a screen of numbers and signs where the bedstead it’s not so foreign as this lake. The plateau, excursionist, is ahead. After that twenty volumes of farmland. Then I must guide us to the wood garage someone has whitened where the light enters through one window like a novel. You must peer at it without weakening, without feeling hero, or heroine, Understanding the distances between characters, their wakeful or sleep searchingness, as far from the twilight ring the slow sunset, the quick dark.

After Otto Piene How does beginning go how does remembering without forgetting go in front of me in the snow a man his back lonesome somber how does beginning go not remembering flashes of light that showed him images when he was a boy quick and blinding see the shadows in the light how does not-remembering go listen to the hissing see the light and Germany’s lightness how bright Germany is like soot like images quick and blinding how does beginning go smell the snow it’s new it fell in the night in the dark gets forgotten in images quick listen to the snow it lies light like linen something’s burning a hissing somber like images at night on walls listen to the hissing smell the smell of burning look at the soot on a white background Translated from the German

When I stop to consider my calling, remark the places a wayward temper impelled me I’ve found in light of where I wandered lost the most appalling evils could have befallen; but when I disregard the journey it’s hard to even fathom I endured so much affliction; what’s more, my days being spent, I feel I’ve seen my wariness go with them. I’ll come to my end, for I surrendered artless to someone with the science to dispel and destroy me if so inclined, else the know-how to want to; for if, with this very hand I could slaughter myself, why—not on my account but because so suited—would my enemy do otherwise? ………………………………………………………………… Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado y a ver los pasos por do me han traído, hallo, según por do anduve, perdido, que la mayor mal pudiera haber llegado; mas cuando del camino estó olvidado, a tanto mal no sé por dó he venido; sé que me acabo, y más he yo sentido ver acabar conmigo mi cuidado. Yo acabaré, que me entregué sin arte a quien sabrá perderme y acabarme si quisiere, y aún sabrá querello; que, pues mi voluntad puede matarme, la suya, que no es tanto de mi parte, pudiendo, ¿qué hará sino hacello? [Garcilaso de la Vega, 1501?-1536]

That Whitsun, I was late getting away: Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence The river’s level drifting breadth began, Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet. All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept For miles inland, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped And rose: and now and then a smell of grass Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth Until the next town, new and nondescript, Approached with acres of dismantled cars. At first, I didn’t notice what a noise The weddings made Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys The interest of what’s happening in the shade, And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls I took for porters larking with the mails, And went on reading. Once we started, though, We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, All posed irresolutely, watching us go, As if out on the end of an event Waving goodbye To something that survived it. Struck, I leant More promptly out next time, more curiously, And saw it all again in different terms: The fathers with broad belts under their suits And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat; An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes, The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. Yes, from cafés And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days Were coming to an end. All down the line Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown, And, as we moved, each face seemed to define Just what it saw departing: children frowned At something dull; fathers had never known Success so huge and wholly farcical; The women shared The secret like a happy funeral; While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared At a religious wounding. Free at last, And loaded with the sum of all they saw, We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast Long shadows over major roads, and for Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem Just long enough to settle hats and say I nearly died, A dozen marriages got under way. They watched the landscape, sitting side by side —An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And someone running up to bowl—and none Thought of the others they would never meet Or how their lives would all contain this hour. I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat: There we were aimed. And as we raced across Bright knots of rail Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail Travelling coincidence; and what it held Stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give. We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

Comes the time when it’s later and onto your table the headwaiter puts the bill, and very soon after rings out the sound of lively laughter— Picking up change, hands like a walrus, and a face like a barndoor’s, and a head without any apparent size, nothing but two eyes— So that’s you, man, or me. I make it as I can, I pick up, I go faster than they know— Out the door, the street like a night, any night, and no one in sight, but then, well, there she is, old friend Liz— And she opens the door of her cadillac, I step in back, and we’re gone. She turns me on— There are very huge stars, man, in the sky, and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie, with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it, and I eat it— Slowly. And while certainly they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket of these cats not making it, I make it in my wicker basket.