872 Life poems

September is work to the center Of arguments and controversies. Prejudgments and incomprehensions. What will I love if not that That was enigma? The years of infancy, Memory says, And there we are, with the demon Of the art of living Traced on the glass of some window. In the beauty of the night of May, Clear of moon, to the lume of a candle There was a design like the profile Of a landscape almost abandoned. Gone But not gone yet. It's fascinating, These mysterious uncovered feelings. Enigma of an afternoon of autumn, the picture Of which is a composition Of the eye of my mind. Every hour That I watch this picture I see again still that moment. Nevertheless the moment is an enigma For me, in how much is inexplicable. The physical things hide in the architecture Of the event. The enigma of a mock-up, Of a shadow, the spectral and eternal aspect Of the moment. Praises to you for being One great box of surprise, Your head the scene of a wonderful theater Of the most tender gray of the fog That joins the sky to the earth. A tangling of truth and memory, Mythology and iconography, I watch with the eye Of the mind the city that accommodates That one beautiful day that is now infinite. It deepens. It begins. The cyclical method. Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction, Is a truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth. I was assigned to you, together we were A beautiful and melancholic picture. This last picture is the realization Of the overwhelming moment In which the acute eye perceives you as a now That is over. A now that is fixed In the swept past.

It is not that you want to be the one to make prints in the untrampled snow It is that you want to be in the snow without having touched it to be of  the snow not beginning Everywhere commerce dictates the shapes that move you along that seat you at the table far from the snow far from the act of not touching It only gets worse A girl’s gotta eat And your hunger’s not even your own

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak. This is America calling: The mirroring of state to state, Of voice to voice on the wires, The force of colloquial greetings like golden Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze. In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives; The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio. If this is the way it is let’s leave, They agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins, Gradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered Only as a recurring tic. And midway We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its Being able to stop us in the headlong night Toward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas The houses doze and seem to wonder why through the Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull. Why be hanging on here? Like kites, circling, Slipping on a ramp of air, but always circling? But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on, Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke. The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves: An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing, As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are, In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet Unrealized projects, and a strict sense Of time running out, of evening presenting The tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit Rather too easily into it, become transparent, Almost ghosts. One day The birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed The color, the density of the surroundings, The leaves are alive, and too heavy with life. A long period of adjustment followed. In the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it But all the fathers returning home On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it: The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it. One day we thought of painted furniture, of how It just slightly changes everything in the room And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today, It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets Out in the middle west toward the end of summer, The look of wanting to back out before the argument Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything? That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit And not just the major events but the whole incredible Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off, Channeling itself into history, will unroll As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room, And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze, Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of. The parade is turning into our street. My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic Features of this instant belong here. The land Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December. The hunch is it will always be this way, The look, the way things first scared you In the night light, and later turned out to be, Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity To what you and they wanted to become: No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.

Some quests begin before a person ever learns to walk. Q’s began at the foundling home, when he was still in diapers. They’d kept anything pointed from the Quonset hut where they housed the orphaned newbies, and later the house mothers forbade the children all but scissors with round edges, even table knives. “Mind, now stay in the queue,” they said, when his fingers reached for a safety pin or a paring knife or, once, one of the razors they kept (usually under lock and key) for the older boys. Q slipped back in line. Only the blunt was available to him, nothing to question, naught with an edge. Best pretend to be dull (though that was hard with a high IQ) and never query:Why hide the scissors? Why hide the razor? Why speak so sharply? Why no mums? No dads? At night in his bed, listening to the breathing of all the other boys in the long room, he also asked himself,Why me? When the house mothers changed shifts, there were always some unsupervised minutes, and that’s when the boys sprang into swashbuckling. Q loved leaping from bed to bed with an imaginary sword in hand.En garde! • At sixteen, with a razor cut on his chin from the new trial of shaving himself, Q stood at the doors of the Royal Flower Hall. He was quaking. This was the very first day of work in his life. He’d been supposed to be a shop assistant, a quotidian job like those of the other orphans who were all sent out to live as apprentices — to return only if found unsuitable. However, the Royal Flower Keeper had stepped in and demanded to know the name of the boy meant to be sent to the local florist, and now young Q was called to prep flowers for the Queen. “Can’t someone else do it?” he quailed as the Flower Keeper 
handed him a quilloned silver thorn knife. Q didn’t want to be found unsuitable. He quivered as thousands of roses arrived — he was supposed to separate their long, tangled stems, cut off the thorns, and queue them up straight on the tables for the arrangers. “But I’m new!” Q cried. He couldn’t quell his horror at the prospect of lifting a real blade to cut the thorns. “Look, dear, no quibbling. If you work here, you’re qualified,” the Flower Keeper said. Her knuckles bloomed out of the crooked stems of her hands. “Hold the knife with two fingers behind this little crossbar, that’s the quillon, and snip under the thorn.” She did it with elegant speed. One thorn gone. “It’s like swordsmanship,” the Flower Keeper joked, wielding her knife, fencing in miniature mime. In Q’s head rang the orders of the house mothers, “ don’t touch! ” But in his fingers lay his imaginary weapon come alive. “No time to be quiescent,” she said. “Equipoise is all.” Don’t quit now, Q said to himself. If he quit, he’d have to slink back to the orphanage, a failed apprentice, instead of going home to his newly found haven, a cold-water flat with a coin-operated heater, all his own. There he’d store the new paring knife his paycheck would buy, the pointed scissors    ...    So Q quashed his fear and set to work. • He began to duel through the roses. “En garde!” he whispered, lunging toward his petaled quarry. Soon there were thorns everywhere (some a bit bloody), but he did not make any big mistakes. He wasn’t perfect, like the Flower Keeper, but he was catching on. Like quicksilver she flashed her knife, each stem quickening with the sharpest cut. Instinctively Q used the quartata maneuver, a quarter turn to the inside, protecting himself as he flicked each thorn into the quagmire of floral detritus on the floor. With each toss of the thorn he added to what appeared to the Flower Keeper to be his nascent gift. As the lorries loaded with rose baskets and vases and bowls roared off to the palace, he quietly pocketed a thorn. Then the first question he’d ever spoken aloud curlicued to his lips. And because he’d had to save up this query for sixteen years, he posed the essential one, previously mouthed only to himself at night in bed: Pourquoi? “Why,” said the Flower Keeper, “for the Equerry, of course. And he for the Queen. You know who she is.” “Just a flower of a figurehead,” Q quipped. The boy’s quick-witted, the Flower Keeper thought, and said, “We’ll require you tomorrow.” And for quadruple tomorrows after that and after that, until Q began to accumulate expertise. Know-how defines a person, especially someone who’s grown up watching his P s and Q s. He no longer 
quavered, quadrillions of roses now quasi-ordinary, royal waste a quiddity. I’m not a quitter, he’d said to himself, and each night went back to his cold-water flat where he had enshrined that little thorn in a matchbox. • Well, he didn’t live in a cold-water flat now. Now he lived in a sunlit house with a stash of razors in the marble bathroom and, in the drawers of his magnificent kitchen, a motherlode of paring knives, bread knives, steak knives, bird’s beak parers, boning knives, cheese knives, chef’s, clam, and carving knives, filleters, and mincers. Now Q was Senior Keeper of the Royal Flower Hall, walking across a stage toward the Queen herself. He had kept the talisman thorn from his very first day with the roses. Just that afternoon he had taken it out and dropped it in the pocket of his tuxedo, anticipating touching it for luck before he received his award from Her Majesty. But when the Queen posed her standard question, “Have you come a long way?” Q was quite bewildered as to how to answer. Sometimes a simple question cuts into an aromatic world of mysteries. But we must learn to answer, to cut. Q, his distinguished silver hair perfectly trimmed, his neck properly shaved, looked down at the curls on the Queen’s forehead and remembered his first unspoken word,Why. A quixotic word, an essential thorn. It had pricked him awake, into manhood. Arrangements of roses passed through his mind — how those magnificats of magentas quenched his imagination. How the choral crooning of pale pinks calmed his qualms. Among roses he had reached his quintessence. Yet, is it a large enough life, to arrange roses for a Queen? When the whole world out there hurtled toward famine and war? He hadn’t intended to stay, to make a future in flowers, taking people’s breath away with something so spectacularly unnecessary as his rose floats. He had been a thorn in someone’s side, spectacularly unnecessary himself. He’d been sent out into the world alone, blunted by the unknown facts of his identity — his search for his parents rewarded only by locked doors, locked cabinets, and, later, graveyards. Patiently Her Majesty waited for his answer. In physical distance he had come a short way, but he’d swashbuckled miles to reach the end of his quest. “Only from Kew Gardens, Your Highness,” Q answered simply at last. Then she put into his palm the royal thank-you, in a quilted sleeve: a silver rose wreath made from an ancient mold that gave it stylized petals, prickly leaves, and, cut in at the bottom of the circle, a thorn. “Q from Alphabetique,” 2013 by Kara Kosaka

The woman in the building across from me hauls onto the fire escape a yucca plant and squeezes it between a crate of herbs and a sapling fern tree. She looks a lot like me from twenty feet away. A forelock lies sweaty against her cheek as if she’s forgotten to fix herself. I put my thumbs and forefingers to my eye and frame her. I am reminded of those Chinese boxes made of red paper, inside one is another holding another, until at the center sits the tiniest mockery and celebration of the cell itself. She looks haggard but happy here, five flights up, bending over a fat leaf as if admiring herself in the waxy surface. Then she opens up the jewel-case of her voice, and I remember how once my sister asked my mother which one of us sang better. My mother paused from sewing as if adding seventeen to seventy-five and said we sounded the same. Good or bad, who knows. Each of us now watches the empty, open mouth of the other.

Every night, we couldn’t sleep. Our upstairs neighbors had to keep Dropping something down the hall— A barbell or a bowling ball, And from the window by the bed, Echoing inside my head, Alley cats expended breath In arias of love and death. Dawn again, across the street, Jackhammers began to beat Like hangovers, and you would frown— That well-built house, why tear it down? Noon, the radiator grill Groaned, gave off a lesser chill So that we could take off our coats. The pipes coughed to clear their throats. Our nerves were frayed like ravelled sleeves, We cherished each our minor griefs To keep them warm until the night, When it was time again to fight; But we were young, did not need much To make us laugh instead, and touch, And could not hear ourselves above The arias of death and love.

Let’s go out and buy something. In the sun. No, let’s stay home and make something, the sun floods the room. It could be green, on paper. It could be money. That’s the way to create new matter. That’s how I detach boats from moorings—my boat, my mooring— the harbor shallow in low tide skiff propelled over buffeting sands flats on sheer puissance.

Perhaps it was just another break-in some years back. Or the charm that suddenly seduces out of nowhere, long rehearsed till you’ve realized too late that half your living life went walking straightway out the door into the noonday glare of some Sunday godforsaken place — somewhere down in central Florida, the so-called Widow State you thought was safe — which at the time still remained obscure, so obscure, in fact, it was almost dark when you awoke, and so unlike yourself as in a manic haze rifling through those drawers for letters, tchotchkes, so much else. So you’d suddenly been had. There are times when the human frailties let down their guard. There is a ring of fire Dante so numbered, named for those who prey upon the old. The kids all grown up and living somewhere else, and you’re left alone stumbling down the hall. It could’ve been a friendly call at first. A friendly knock. A slight accent adding to the charm. A friend of a friend of a so-called friend no time to trace. That noonday glare of sunlight as a halo for that added touch. Have you forgotten anything? Anything?

Trying to walk the same way to the same store takes high-wire balance: each step not exactly as before risks chasms of flatness. One stumble alone and nothing happens. Few are the willing and fewer the champions.

I should like to live in a sunny town like this Where every afternoon is half-day closing And I would wait at the terminal for the one train Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving. At the far end of the platform is a tunnel, and the train Slows out of it like a tear from a single eye. You couldn’t get further than this, the doors all opened And the porter with rolled sleeves wielding a mop. Even if one restless traveller were to arrive With leather grip, racquets under the arm, A belted raincoat folded over the shoulder, A fishing hat, and a pipe stuck in his mouth, There would be nowhere for him to move on to And he would settle down to tea in the lounge Of the Goat Hotel, doing yesterday’s crossword, And would emerge later, after a nap, for a drink. You meet them in the bar, glassy-eyed, all the time. They never quite unpack, and expect letters From one particular friend who doesn’t write. If you buy them a drink they will tell you their life history: ‘I should have liked to live in a sunny town like this, Strolling down to the harbour in the early evening, Looking at the catch. Nothing happens here. You could forget the ill-luck dogging you. ‘I could join the Fancy Rat Society and train Sweet peas over the trellised porch Of my little slice of stuccoed terrace. I could Be in time for the morning service at Tesco’s. ‘I expect death’s like this, letters never arriving And the last remembered failure at once abandoned And insistent, like a card on a mantelpiece. What might it be? You can take your choice. ‘ “I shook her by the shoulders in a rage of frustration.” “I smiled, and left the room without saying a word.” “I was afraid to touch her, and never explained.” “I touched her once, and that was my greatest mistake.” ’ You meet them before dinner. You meet them after dinner, The unbelieved, the uncaressed, the terrified. Their conversation is perfectly decent but usually It slows to a halt and they start to stare into space. You would like it here. Life is quite ordinary And the self-pity oozes into the glass like bitters. What’s your poison? Do you have a desire to drown? We’re all in the same boat. Join us. Feel free. And when the bar closes we can say goodbye And make our way to the terminal where the last (Or is it the first?) train of the day is clean and waiting To take us slowly back to where we came from. But will we ever return? Who needs us now? It’s the town that requires us, though the streets are empty. It’s become a habit and a retreat. Or a form of justice. Living in a sunny town like this.