872 Life poems

I wake up, bound tightly. A warm, valerian smell cascades to my palate. I can only move my eyelids and toes. Heat sits impishly on my chest, at my throat, curtains of it brushing against me. Panic creeps out of my armpits. I can only move my eyelids and toes, and this constant fluttering lulls me to sleep. I awake late and move like a bee through the apartment, from station to station from the blue flame to the shimmering disc. From the stairs to the street, to the grocery store. To the meat aisle. To the cocktail wieners. To make pigs-in-a-blanket, to share them with friends. To sink into bed, to bind myself tightly in blankets, to flutter off into sleep, and then on past sleep, to be carried by admirers across a wooden bridge. Later I will burn this bridge.

She invents wilderness out of absence, erases houses, the husband, the sewer pipe and the suburb it empties. Leaving the sparrow, the snake. Daily walks in her Virginia suburb minus the curb. Biographers struggle to account for these years in the wilderness, the housewife off hiking. Maybe her Virginia should be a West Virginia: wilder, less money, the creek a holler not this empty cul-de-sac. Some days she erased all but the air, maybe the light. Husband of the space bar, carpool a clean section break. She became a man in the wilderness and won the Pulitzer. I told the truth, she said, only I left some out. What rises in such a clearing? What stays home checking and re-checking the egg.

How solitary and resolute you look in the morning. A stoic in your cotton sleeve. Do you dream of walking out rain or shine a truffle balanced on your sternum and passing me on the sidewalk? Or is that a smile because you interpret nothing and statelessness is where you live? How calmly you indulge my moods. See you tonight, by the sovereign chartreuse ceramics at the Met. Let's hear what you'd do differently.

It hangs around the wardrobe for days, dull, or reclines in the hamper like a flattened flamingo. I wash it in soft water. I give it new life, and what thanks? It walks out the door with my legs, through the gate, headed straight for the racetrack.

Yesterday I found my pipe while pondering a long evening of work, of fine winter work. Thrown aside were my cigarettes, with all the childish joys of summer, into the past which the leaves shining blue in the sun, the muslins, illuminate, and taken up once again was the grave pipe of a serious man who wants to smoke for a long while without being disturbed, so as better to work: but I was not prepared for the surprise that this abandoned object had in store for me; for hardly had I drawn the first puff when I forgot the grand books I was planning to write, and, amazed, moved to a feeling of tenderness, I breathed in the air of the previous winter which was now coming back to me. I had not been in contact with my faithful sweetheart since returning to France, and now all of London, London as I had lived it a year ago entirely alone, appeared before my eyes: first the dear fogs that muffle one’s brains and have an odor of their own there when they penetrate beneath the casements. My tobacco had the scent of a somber room with leather furniture sprinkled by coal dust, on which the thin black cat would curl and stretch; the big fires! and the maid with red arms pouring coals, and the noise of those coals falling from the sheet-iron bucket into the iron scuttle in the morning—when the postman gave the solemn double knock that kept me alive! Once again I saw through the windows those sickly trees of the deserted square—I saw the open sea, crossed so often that winter, shivering on the deck of the steamer wet with drizzle and blackened from the fumes—with my poor wandering beloved, decked out in traveller’s clothes, a long dress, dull as the dust of the roads, a coat clinging damply to her cold shoulders, one of those straw hats with no feather and hardly any ribbons that wealthy ladies throw away upon arrival, mangled as they are by the sea, and that poor loved ones refurbish for many another season. Around her neck was wound the terrible handkerchief that one waves when saying goodbye forever.

1 We call change in a person the effect of time, witness my new dress, so short, with buttons on the yoke shaped like swans. I enter from the back of the room, pausing at the hopeful energy of people gathered to see me. They are a surface, alive and redolent, half unseen, like iridescent cloth. I sense structure spontaneously form, as when crossing the room to greet you, what I say forms. And I worry that spontaneity acts for its own reasons, not mine. My dress is a visual image of unconscious affirmative processes, the way spontaneity expresses its order, as I create a world, stocking it with small dogs on the runway, handbags, a bouillonne of rose tulle at the waist of a jacket. So, I'm not limited to what I observe, rather than feel. 2 They assess quite accurately my choice of babydoll dress as value for others. Each absorbs encouragement from her assessment, even though every being's imprinted with data to create every appearance. Seeing a leaf may reveal knowledge that communicates instantly among microbes, which can change in a wink. So, the optimistic idea would be the most biologically pertinent one. I dress to express a hoped for solution. Rachel's blouse, for example, is not purple just for photographers' enjoyment. Flowers are intrinsic to her feeling for her value, she seeks by expression to extend. Each guest creates her own sumptuous panoply from my honey sable coat over silvery pajamas, new, vintage, because of simultaneous time, therefore matter. So, physical change is not time, as such. 3 I feel love from the fashion community as light from photographs of others' bodies as light from their scrutiny of my photograph in a dress bold enough to sustain the penetration of disembodied light of my entrance. To audience, unnamed cutters, sewers, embroiderers, beaders I attribute this beauty, when meaning i.e., style, is given a sympathetic presence. Mirroring touches it, like exquisite jet beads on a gray coatdress in almost transparent bouclé, clusters of dark stones on the shoulder. A loose blouse in cream silk crepe is tied at the sleeves with glistening cellophane ribbons. You feel I understand your own contingency plans. Do you remember my show in London, when all the models were drunk, broken glass everywhere? Fashion does that, giving shape and color to our inarticulate impulses. I present the contemporary as liminal, transitions, transparencies. You nurture the uncontained confusion, when no permeable resonance has yet formed. The gray is cloudy, deep, but without melancholy. 4 Before dinner, we're asked to sign the guestbook on a Boulle console in the hall. People I've seen in magazines seem very tall, their features enlarged from being photographed. Each appearance has a materiality more significant than we usually expect from bodies. Style, soul, is power through which matter is formed. Like historic change, a body can re-materialize in its chrysalis, when the life you know is left behind. You're alone in a white brocade jacket with fur trim and frosting white cloque, a skirt of stiff flounces, like quartz crystals flecked with gold. In this chrysalis, you now change the contemporary, viewing the past in extending light that's mobile around your body. My dress is not stuck in time like a butterfly born in a jar, whose wings are therefore useless. 5 In the dining room, with Ming wallpaper restored by young Chinese artists, Kiki wears a blue silk coat embroidered with gold. I mention Louise's white helmet, Camilla on pewter platforms flashing to gold, light on water, what we mean visually by souls for whom the the body is potential, futural. In my closet, there's no distinction between material and the intelligible. When I continue to dress after I tell  him my dog has died, he begins to weep. He asks how I can waste this evening chattering? I say through tears I mourn my little dog, but that means little to him, because of my outfit. He makes a mistake in reading, like a wrong accessory, inserting an extra vowel or syllable and changing the whole passage, though I don't usually wear sheer stockings with that dress. It was a case of spontaneity, a transparent white warp like an open window through which a moment is perceived, unshaded by the physical. And in fact, many in the room were not in good health. Through this window, I take in a non-causative molecule to change myself, what a mother administers, placebo, the intent of a dress. When you wear it for the first time, you're surprised by a rush of feeling for yourself.

That day we were trapped between chartreuse living room walls and the godly cleanliness of afghans saving sofas and chairs. We were talking about anything except Uncle Carl— gone, how we'd miss him— when Uncle Gus came down the hall and stood in the archway, his wiry body strapped under a black accordion. "Haven't played," he said, "for a long time." So he played a waltz and I squirmed in my chair under the slow flow of grief. He played a polka and I heard my sister clapping lightly for the mourner bending over the keys. His cheek-bones, red as Helgoland's cliffs on the North Sea. Gulls whirled and screamed around the black load on his heart.

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct. Gull feathers of glass, hidden in white pulp: the bones of squid which I pull out and lay blade by blade on the draining board— tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce the heart, but fragile, substance belying design.               Or a fruit,mamey, cased in rough brown peel, the flesh rose-amber, and the seed: the seed a stone of wood, carved and polished, walnut-colored, formed like a brazilnut, but large, large enough to fill the hungry palm of a hand. I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glow in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

As I was guided by the director through the thick space Of these rooms, worn sparrow brown, and strode With the August sun on my shoulders across this particular Acre of grass, nobody had told me this was the place Where you had summered as a boy.  I have weathered My fourth decade, older now than you were When you died. I can barely remember you, yet I can see You not as my father but as my son. You are age nine. The downpour divides into two massive stage curtains Parting. You bolt from the bunk, loudly racing With your chums down the slippery hill to the dock, Your cape of a towel flapping as if ready to lift you airborne. You are the smallest. Still, you always run in the front. You do not know how beautiful you are, of course, squinting Against the sun, the flame that escapes behind the gray Vapor for hours, sometimes for days. You cannot see That from the beginning it has been eyeing you from afar, That it has focused its golden spotlight just for you.

I’m in the house. It’s nice out: warm sun on cold snow. First day of   spring or last of   winter. My legs run down the stairs and out the door, my top half   here typing