873 Life poems

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue. We fitted our shoes with tongues as smooth as our own and hung tongues inside bells so we could listen to their emotional language, and because we loved graceful profiles the pitcher received a lip, the bottle a long, slender neck. Even what was beyond us was recast in our image; we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye, the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety.

(Written by Martial) My friend, the things that do attain The happy life be these, I find: The riches left, not got with pain, The fruitful ground; the quiet mind; The equal friend; no grudge, no strife; No charge of rule nor governance; Without disease the healthy life; The household of continuance; The mean diet, no dainty fare; True wisdom joined with simpleness; The night discharged of all care, Where wine the wit may not oppress; The faithful wife, without debate; Such sleeps as may beguile the night: Content thyself with thine estate, Neither wish death, nor fear his might.

No children; Cold uncoils in the blood; Science, true, not good For you. So old, Suddenly, or so young. Lyric inside not to be sung. Plug pulled, screen gone. Sun out; mind Bountiful, playing pain. These are my children In my head. Unbegotten. This is to self-forget, To have the future Born forgotten.

From the old bridge we’d been stopped on, a little below us, it looked like a diving board. When the girl switched her sign from Stop to Slow I saw across the river three men standing like old- fashioned divers at its base, newsreels we’d seen of men in swim caps. “Hard hats,” you literal you. You agreed with “like a diving board,” but no spring to it. Something below was holding it up, something concrete. It was the business of your life. Concrete— but for me the men were waiting their turn over there, each to compete for the best two-and-a-half gainer to knife the Tye River. They’d die, you said. “That’s a fine span,” I learned, “a very long one— they didn’t make ’em like that back then.” Or us either, I thought as I almost saw the Hard Hat bounce at the tip, his one knee up to his waist. “Inspectors,” you said as we drove across, “lolly- gagging.” Whichever. Our span is ready.

We barge out of the womb with two of them: eyes, ears, arms, hands, legs, feet. Only one heart.  Not a good plan.  God should know we need at least a dozen, a baker’s dozen of hearts. They break like Easter eggs hidden in the grass, stepped on and smashed. My own heart is patched, bandaged, taped, barely the same shape it once was when it beat fast for you.

I wake to light jackhammering, and news follows: a plane failed over the sea. All want to go home, but drastic curfews obtain from a meridian. *     *     * We are a long way from a sea that cedes black boxes from an area forested as the Andes. Instead, a Mercedes, black as La Brea, leaps from the backlit red, anonymous, when we try to cross at the traffic island discarding hibiscus with every wind-toss. *     *     * We are a long way from the courteous lilac or waxwing with sensitive feather tipped as a kayak is tipped by a coxswain.

our suppers stunned on the table hold radios hold flasks of sound, sharp intensities bottled up for a time I taste your imagination, authors, and place it among cotton trees whose white stuff perches, cousins of the air if the manner could be political the high walls protect against disgust the lady of blue glass joined by Pierrot, a griffin,    papers, books, the chilled correspondence,     and another woman whose futurist shape suggests lines of the wind on my desk to awaken the traffic would have to run into the radio

is not turning the way you thought it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop, the way a child draws the tail of a pig. What came out of your mouth, a riff of common talk. As a sudden weather shift on a beach, sky looming mountains of cloud in a way you cannot predict or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens, takes its own side. And it is strange. Far more complicated than a few phrases pieced together around a kitchen table on a July morning in Dallas, say, a city you don’t live in, where people might shop forever or throw a thousand stories away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted? Stories wandering out, having their own free lives? Maybe they are planning something bad. A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember is growing into a weird body with many demands. One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock, knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

Life in unbridled collapse, Let tuneful praise ascend Not a single line out of step with my band, aboard the riverboat when the sun shown red and especially dark upon my room I was shown to 3464 once Jack Lon dons I was told. The black forest alcohols filled my mind, my one & only skull with rock crystal (The Butchers Field) Its grass & the stream cut my rooms in 3. I write & I laugh to think again upon the stream, its demon black mask lights under- neath My servants stay fine & lower their eyes I proclaim the empire, my coat of arms & cigarettes to be held across façades of cathedrals, crimson the flight. More than one death from a square bottled ink The MARVEL brand I enjoy reading signs through the fog— -HOTEL HUNTINGTON- Then that evening and all of Fox Plaza  was the same white A permanent stripe on my blue bike I raise my hood I think there are other lost men in surrounding blocks alike in their thinking “There is no other man to enjoy such fog besides me.”          to wander tracks in clear star cut ground I am sorry I said he was already high We got so high together and I forgot to say I had invested a lot in my first walkthrough the greatest Marco Polo single file best roulette There’s a bad moon on the rise and I’ve got quite a stash rubbings from the calligram graves, I have explained their hollows and brick a cross where it is written in script YOUNG BLOOD STRAIGHT EDGE Impossibly accurate                 the fifth wristwatch diamond on the 12 I have reached the cave    it has been shot up. & I am punished to this day ruby under black letterpress My name goes first.

Some people might describe this room as spare: a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique chair; a mattress and a coffee mug; an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug my mother used to own. I used to have a phone. I used to have another room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge. I used to water my bouquet of paper clips and empty pens, of things I thought I’d want to say if given chance; but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch a particle of thought dote on the dust and dwindle in a little grid of shadow on the sunset’s patchy rust seems like enough.