873 Life poems

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

Born on Monday and a tiny world-containing grain of light passed through each eye like heaven through a needle. And on Tuesday he screamed for a small ear in which to hide. He rolled on Wednesday, rolled his whole body full of immense salt spaces, slowly from one horizon to the other. And on Thursday, trembling, crippled, broke beyond his given strength and crawled. And on Friday he stood upright. And on Saturday he tested a footstep and the sky came down and alit on his shoulder full of various languages in which one bird doesn’t answer to another. And on Sunday he dreamed he was flying and his mind grew gold watching the moon and he began to sing to the brink of speaking

stepping off the curb onto the right foot, the left foot following in due time, dragging a heavy weight that goes “thud” as if falls those few inches collective guilt cannot fit inside individualism In the cabinet under the bathroom sink, the household items, bottles and canisters of detergent, Pledge Lemon Trigger, and, along the inner corners of the cabinet and its edges,—dark stains, eukaryotic organisms, branched filamentous hyphae —screaming and pointing at the crud women whose hair was stiffened into “beehives,” as they were called,— —canceling out the odor-producing glands under their shaven armpits by spraying on chasm lice chemicals sliding the waist-line down to pierce the gluteus with the splinter of a hypodermic The dishes sparkle, they literally glitter and throw off incandescent particles barely able to eat, no appetite, not taste buds the food stays fresh for months and, even after over a year, is still crunchy when chewed holding a clean handkerchief over nose and mouth eyes irritated with a burny carbolic sensation irrigate the sunken cheeks, the sandpaper lips tongue blindly groping upward to lap at the moisture of tears droplets of a fluid dispensed from small milky-plastic bottles only a couple of inches in height might reduce the discomfort,—later tossing the expired bottle into a wastebasket, the fumes distorting whatever’s seen through the vapors, like a road on a hot summer day What started as a slight dryness in the throat soon progressed to desiccated lips crinkly as crepe paper it’s perfectly natural to ignore a faint aftertaste it involved no joke saying “Does this taste funny to you?,” very dour look on their faces, to the extent that the word “faces” still applies plants other than the desired plant life are ripped from the ground wearing a thick glove The gardener finished with his chores, and went around to the back of the shed to hose himself down with a garden hose, bare-chested, rubbing his hand over his glistening pectoral muscles, the nozzle—

(for Sarah when she’s older) The round and sad-eyed man puffed cigars as if he were alive. Gillyflowers to the left of the apple, purple bells to the right and a grass-covered hill behind. I am sad today said the sad-eyed man for I have locked my head in a Japanese box and lost the key. I am sad today he told me for there are gillyflowers by the apple and purple bells I cannot see. Will you look at them for me he asked, and tell me what you find? I cannot I replied for my eyes have grown sugary and dim from reading too long by candlelight. Tell me what you’ve read then said the round and sad-eyed man. I cannot I replied for my memory has grown tired and dim from looking at things that can’t be seen by any kind of light and I’ve locked my head in a Japanese box and thrown away the key. Then I am you and you are me said the sad-eyed man as if alive. I’ll write you in where I should be between the gillyflowers and the purple bells and the apple and the hill and we’ll puff cigars from noon till night as if we were alive.

After Porfirio Barba Jacob’s Canción De La Vida Profunda Variable, changeable, yes, there are days when people like us are like that. Maybe under some other sky something like glory smiles on us, maybe there life is clear, maybe there things open up on the way the sea stretches out to the horizon— but us, we’re blown by chance the way wind blows blades of grass lightly blowing them all one way. And then there are days when we feel April, the fields of April making us feel our bodies longing to be held and fucked into oblivion, bodies fertile as a field in April, swollen, trembling to be touched: and under the influences of rains pouring down as if pure spirit poured into us like rain, that thing called “soul” sprouts and branches and entangles us in lush bowers and thickets of illusion. Oh yes, days come along when we’re calm, clear —childhood sunsets, lagoons rippling sapphire!— days when a verse, a sudden whistle, days when a mountain and bird passing over it, days when even our own pain and what we feel it to be like make us smile. And sure, there are days when we're so disgusting, so sordid to ourselves it’s like we’re dark stone in the darkness inside flint: then nighttime surprises us, its lamplight dizzying, cold, profuse, glinting off tossed coins of the good, the terrible shining with the gleam of that primal metal. And other days come, come when women want to cry their come cries and use us as their own, days when we’re itching to get a woman naked, and then we can’t face it, can’t stand it somehow, they want us but we don’t know how to want them back: arm tightening around a waist, hand cupping a breast, we don’t dare touch the roundness of an apple or a pear, the round earth spins us off into space. And then there arrive days so dismal and stupefied and numb that the idiot soughing of a pine grove sounds like weeping: and what some idiot called the soul whines and wails and carries on with what some other idiot calls “the pain of the world”: and maybe not God himself, that absolute fool, can make that wind less cutting, or make it stop. And then there comes, certain to come, oh my earth I love beyond any of my days, a day . . . a day . . . a day when my sail catches the wind and drags the anchor up out of the bottom muck, and nothing can withstand that wind blowing by, talking to itself, talking, talking . . . and the day is mine and yours and every living thing’s . . . the day when nobody and nothing can keep us from getting up and going, no matter who we are . . . the day when our leaving is the same as our arriving.

High-hearted Surrey! I do love your ways, Venturous, frank, romantic, vehement, All with inviolate honor sealed and blent, To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier-bays: I love your youth, your friendships, whims, and frays; Your strict, sweet verse, with its imperious bent, Heard as in dreams from some old harper’s tent, And stirring in the listener’s brain for days. Good father-poet! if to-night there be At Framlingham none save the north-wind’s sighs, No guard but moonlight’s crossed and trailing spears, Smile yet upon the pilgrim named like me, Close at your gates, whose fond and weary eyes Sought not one other down three hundred years!

for Tony I could not disengage my world from the rest of humanity. Wind chill factor 11° below. All night wind thrashes barechested trees like a West Texas tent evangelist hissing them on his knees, lisping sinnn . . . sinn . . . sinn . . . All night wind preaches. Old tool shed behind my house fist-cuffs itself to nail-loose tin, horse pasture gates clank their crimes, while neighing black stallions of rain stampede on the patio fleeing gunshots of thunder . . . . Miles south of here, nightscopes pick up human heat that green fuzz helicopter dash panels. A mother whispers, “Sssshhhh mejito, nomás poco más allá. Nomás poco más allá.” Dunes of playing-dead people jack rabbit under strobe lights and cutting whack/blades, “Ssshhh mejito. Sssshhhh.” Child whimpers and staggers in blinding dust and gnashing wind. Those not caught, scratch sand up to sleep against underbellies of roots and stones. Eventually Juanito comes to my door, sick from eating stucco chips— his meals scratched off walls of temporary shelters, and Enrique, who guzzled water at industrial pipes pouring green foam out at the El Paso/Juarez border, and Maria steaming with fever, face dark meteorite, whispers, “Where I come from, Señor Baca, a woman’s womb is a rock, and children born from me, drop like stones, to become dust under death squad’s boots.” And Juanito, “They came at midnight and took my brothers. I have never seen them since. Each judge’s tongue is a bleeding stub of death, and each lawyer’s finger a soft coffin nail.” And Enrique, “You can trust no one. Each crying person’s eye is a damp cellar where thieves and murderers sleep.” They have found refuge here at Black Mesa. The sun passes between our lives, as between two trees, one gray, one green, but side by side.

Scrambled eggs and whiskey in the false-dawn light. Chicago, a sweet town, bleak, God knows, but sweet. Sometimes. And weren’t we fine tonight? When Hank set up that limping treble roll behind me my horn just growled and I thought my heart would burst. And Brad M. pressing with the soft stick, and Joe-Anne singing low. Here we are now in the White Tower, leaning on one another, too tired to go home. But don’t say a word, don’t tell a soul, they wouldn’t understand, they couldn’t, never in a million years, how fine, how magnificent we were in that old club tonight.

I was chasing this blue butterfly down the road when a car came by and clipped me. It was nothing serious, but it angered me and I turned around and cursed the driver who didn't even slow down to see if I was hurt. Then I returned my attention to the butterfly which was nowhere to be seen. One of the Doubleday girls came running up the street with her toy poodle toward me. I stopped her and asked, "Have you seen a blue butterfly around here?" "It's down near that birch tree near Grandpa's," she said. "Thanks," I said, and walked briskly toward the tree. It was fluttering from flower to flower in Mr. Doubleday's extensive garden, a celestial blueness to soothe the weary heart. I didn't know what I was doing there. I certain- ly didn't want to capture it. It was like something I had known in another life, even if it was only in a dream, I wanted to confirm it. I was a blind beggar on the streets of Cordoba when I first saw it, and now, again it was here.