873 Life poems

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.

Because he was a butcher and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right), I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was any more a brute than you or I; For when they told him that his wife must die, He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright, And cried like a great baby half that night, And made the women cry to see him cry. And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest, He packed a lot of things that she had made Most mournfully away in an old chest Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

…When that joy is gone for good I move the arms beneath the blood. When my blood is running wild I sew the clothing of a child. When that child is never born I lean my breast against a thorn. When the thorn brings no reprieve I rise and live, I rise and live. When I live from hand to hand Nude in the marketplace I stand. When I stand and am not sold I build a fire against the cold. When the cold does not destroy I leap from ambush on my joy…

Hardly a ghost left to talk with. The slavs moved on or changed their names to something green. Greeks gave up old dishes and slid into repose. Runs of salmon thin and thin until a ripple in October might mean carp. Huge mills bang and smoke. Day hangs thick with commerce and my favorite home, always overgrown with roses, collapsed like moral advice. Tugs still pound against the outtide pour but real, running on some definite fuel. I can’t dream anything, not some lovely woman murdered in a shack, not saw mills going broke, not even wild wine and a landslide though I knew both well. The blood still begs direction home. This river points the way north to the blood, the blue stars certain in their swing, their fix. I pass the backwash where the cattails still lean north, familiar grebes pop up, the windchill is the same. And it comes back with the odor of the river, some way I know the lonely sources of despair break down from too much love. No matter how this water fragments in the reeds, it rejoins the river and the bright bay north receives it all, new salmon on their way to open ocean, the easy tub returned.

I shall foot it Down the roadway in the dusk, Where shapes of hunger wander And the fugitives of pain go by. I shall foot it In the silence of the morning, See the night slur into dawn, Hear the slow great winds arise Where tall trees flank the way And shoulder toward the sky. The broken boulders by the road Shall not commemorate my ruin. Regret shall be the gravel under foot. I shall watch for Slim birds swift of wing That go where wind and ranks of thunder Drive the wild processionals of rain. The dust of the travelled road Shall touch my hands and face.

I like the story of the circus waif bought by the man-of-weights to be his mistress, Profit the demon dragging her to market and Lust the soul who paid in lire for her. I like the peculiarities of her faith, the startling quality of that innocence, kissing the hand that dealt her cruelty believing, poor and dumb, that this was love. I relish a destitution stripped to sing pure in a voice all passion and denial: such are the driven burning by their breath more than mere air allows and cold permits. I savor my own involvement and concern lest all the transformations seem unreal, lest love be painted water-sweet and classic rather than salt and anguish to the end. I like her squatting in the village road combing the dust for something of her own, coming away belonging and committed, roots to be cherished, stones she could befriend. And what I like the subtlest and profoundest is that the circus traveled grief to grief educating the waif into a woman loving and beautiful and fiercely proud. I think of the sense of fury in that road, stooping to scratch the earth out for a life somewhere awaiting finding in one’s name. I like that, and I like the word Expense. I think of the years together which they had, the strong-man working her into the act, that hint, despite himself, of some devotion. I like that, and I like the ring of Cost. Not in a root, or stone, but in a man she found a thing to hold her tenderness. I like her dedication after that, her saying, if she spoke, I live by this. And what I like pervasive and forever is that my eyes have wept the tale before, wanting the telling not so much as story but for the way the waif befits my life.

Curtains drawn back, the door ajar. All winter long, it seemed, a darkening Began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the street Conspire and combine toward one community. These are the rooms of Robinson. Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though All the blurred daybreaks of the spring Found an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone, Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floors And moonlight of a different kind, He might awake to hear the news at ten, Which will be shocking, moderately. This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire To die like this has known a lessening. Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear. But not in sleep.—Observant scholar, traveller, Or uncouth bearded figure squatting in a cave, A keen-eyed sniper on the barricades, A heretic in catacombs, a famed roué, A beggar on the streets, the confidant of Popes— All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns, “There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize— This city—nightmare—black—” He wakes in sweat To the terrible moonlight and what might be Silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs, And the long curtains blow into the room.

the Tuesday after he was last seen. A policeman is there to pick the shrill thing up. Who is it? the couple of friends present ask as he cups it to his ear. Then hangs up. There was no one there. They have come to recon a vacant property—a mise en scéne: Knoll butterfly chairs—a pair of them— two red socks soaking in the white bathroom sink, a saucer of milk for the cat to drink, a stack of reel-to-reel tapes, a matchbook from the Italian Village where he ate his last spaghetti dinner, & two books he’d been re-reading, or wanted someone to think he had: The Devils&The Tragic Sense of Life. Preoccupation & a certain mode of self-presentation. Even when absent, Robinson has a style. No wallet, though. No watch, no sleeping bag, no bankbook. The apartment looks the way it feels to read a newspaper that’s one day old. The policeman wants to go back outside, among the lemons & fog & barking dogs. Out where the sun can copper their faces. Writing takes space, recordings take time. The place puts the policeman in mind of something he read recently, about the collapse of a dead star. About how it takes ages for the light to become motionless. Seven years after a disappearance, a person can be pronounced dead. But that’s nothing compared to the size of the ocean.

It’s a simple resistance between the pull of springs and struggle of joints: two coiled silver muscles working in the lamp against blue washers and pivot plates, locking nut coolly swiveling loose with age. In the arm it’s done with blood: tissues plumped then promptly deflated. What else am I supposed to start with? Not the light bulb, to which this whole narrative yearns, loving the glass envelope sizzling with light, grasshopper antennae scrubbed with electricity until each filament’s turned to fire. No, I have to start with the arm first, the mint-blue lamp, then maybe light itself to specify what startles me about you, globe of hot fruit, Christ heart throbbing in the open chest; curtains of robe parted just enough to see what afterglow defines us, waits for us, rubbing its slow music out into the wet dark— Tonight, I’m counting out my seeds of waiting for you through a current that is silent and might always be, though it thrums in every gesture: like this white eye burning within the metal shade I carefully adjust over a plate of orange slices each evening.