872 Life poems

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.

An obituary has more news than this day, brilliant, acid yellow and silver off the water at land’s end. The disparate prismatic things blind you as they fin their way across the surface of the water. This light cannot inform you of your dying. Fish of lustrous nothing, fish of desire, fish whose push and syllable can make things happen, fish whose ecstatic hunger is no longer news, and fish whose mouth zeroes the multitudes, the hosts who wait for their analogies and something nice to eat, the billions the waves commemorate in their breaking down to their knees on the shore, their cloacal sound. Now how can I stay singular? How can even ore part die when I split and split like the smallest animal in the ocean until I’m famous in my dismemberment, splendid in my hunger, and anonymous— so that naming one is like naming one runnel the sea, or one drop of blood the intoxicating passion? I keep the multitudes in mind when I hear daily that one has murdered another. A news more silver than given, more light than anything captured. And I hold them all in mind—the fulgence, the data, and the death, or else I lose it, that package of slippery fish, that don’t die exactly but smell in a heaven so low we can hear the moans and feel the circles and bite in each cell.

In their doorways women sit sewing By the good light of afternoon And nothing is beyond knowing Though the sun shall go down soon A shepherdess near a bramble ditch And the Princess in the Alcazar Keep the same precise stitch And they both can see far And when the knell tolls All are wondering who— If it is a lady, many bells For a beggar, one will do