872 Life poems

We drink too much pineapple rum, straight from the bottle, bitch about the red-haired girl, the fetish model, a preacher’s daughter with a thing for unreasonable shoes. From her faded patchwork quilt, bleeding hearts, we watched her mutate into a PVC Alice Liddell. How did she manage in seven-inch patent heels? She was tall as wheat — or the ceiling was low. Cradling a mewing ginger-ball, she kissed the mirror where their confederate-blue eyes matched. Three scars began to scab on her arm, deep big-cat scrawls she told us she cut herself because it’s art and her clients like her that way. We followed her clip-clop down the rabbit hole; me, to hear tales of her running track in those shoes; you, to see her white skin even paler under lights. Back in your dorm room, I am static. You pay to watch her pixelated Snow White online; complain her constant chatter ruined it, or her, for you.

The predictability of these rooms is, in a word, exquisite. These rooms in a word. The moon is predictably exquisite, as is the view of the moon through the word. Nevertheless, we were hoping for less. Less space, less light. We were hoping to pay more, to be made to pay in public. We desire a flat, affected tone. A beware of dog on keep off grass. The glass ceiling is exquisite. Is it made of glass? No, glass.

You are trying to solve a problem. You’re almost certainly halfway done, maybe more. You take some salt, some alum, and put it into the problem. Its color goes from yellow to royal blue. You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem, as into a Peruvian quipu of colored string. You enter the problem’s bodegas, its flea markets, souks. Amid the alleys of sponges and sweets, of jewelry, spices, and hair combs, you ponder which stall, which pumpkin or perfume, is yours. You go inside the problem’s piano. You choose three keys. One surely must open the door of the problem, if only you knew only this: is the quandary edible or medical, a problem of reason or grief? It is looking back at you now with the quizzical eyes of a young, bright dog. Her whole body pitched for the fetch, the dog wants to please. If only she could ascertain which direction, what object, which scent of riddle, and if the problem is round or elliptical in its orbit, and if it is measured in foot-pounds, memory, or meat.

So grateful the process is clean and faithful. Does not cheat like a disenchanted spouse dozing on a haggard couch. Take heart: the process is always right — is automatic, phlegmatic. Clean, cold, and always refreshing. Brewed to perfection some say. Guaranteed to satisfy you might say. Give thanks the process is organized. Synchronized and sterilized. Optimized but not disguised, like the grown man at my door long after trick-or-treaters have gone, hand outstretched, mask covering his eyes. Thankful, too, for the oversight: no boogeyman standing over the drain pipe, clogging it with debris when no one sees so he can charge you your life for the cleaning; name your price. And how shall we praise the instruments of investigation? So shiny, so new, gleaming with silver and glass? No traces of fingerprints or funders. No whispered voices softly requesting, of the results, a first glance. There’s no need to come clean. We know the process won’t fall prey to steak and wine and then slink upstairs to spend some time, just a little. The process doesn’t. The process wouldn’t. The process isn’t that kind.

You could drive out of this country and attack the world with your ambition, invent wonder plasmas, become an artist of the provocative gesture, the suggestive nod, you could leave wanting the world and return carrying it, a noisy bundle of steam and libido, a ball of fire balanced on your tongue, you might reclaim Main Street in a limo longer than a sermon, wave at our red faces while remembering that you were born a clod hopper, a farmer’s kid, and get over that hump once and for all by telling A Great Man’s stories— the dirty jokes of dictators, tidbits of presidential hygiene, insights into the psychotropic qualities of power and the American tradition of kissing moneyed ass. Your uncle would still call you Roy Boy, pheasants sun themselves beside the tracks, waiting for the dew to burn off before their first flight, and corn grow so high that if you stood in the field you’d disappear, the fact aiming your eyes down the road.

I Prodigal, what were your wanderings about? The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure. The earth grew music and the tubers sprouted to Sesenne's singing, rain-water, fresh patois in a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns, and pure things took root like the sweet-potato vine. Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew, as the sun turns into a cipher from a green flash, clouds crumble like cities, the embers of Carthage; any man without a history stands in nettles and no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags, does he, still a child, long for battles and castles from the books of his beginning, in a hieratic language he will never inherit, but one in which he writes "Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew," his whole life a language awaiting translation? Since I am what I am, how was I made? To ascribe complexion to the intellect is not an insult, since it takes its plaid like the invaluable lizard from its background, and if our work is piebald mimicry then virtue lies in its variety to be adept. On the warm stones of Florence I subtly alter to a Florentine till the sun passes, in London I am pieced by fog, and shaken from reflection in Venice, a printed page in the sun on which a cabbage-white unfolds, a bookmark. To break through veils like spiders' webs, crack carapaces like a day-moth and achieve a clarified frenzy and feel the blood settle like a brown afternoon stream in River Doree is what I pulsed for in my brain and wrist for the drifting benediction of a drizzle drying on this page like asphalt, for peace that passes like a changing cloud, to a hawk's slow pivot. II In the vale of Santa Cruz I look to the hills. The white flowers have the fury of battle, they lay siege to the mountains, for war there is the tumult of the white ravines, and the cascade's assault; they bow their plumes, Queen Anne's lace, bougainvillea, orchid and oleander, and they are as white as arrested avalanches, angry and Alpine, their petals blur into a white gust from the Matterhom or the streets of Zermatt. Both worlds are welded, they were seamed by delight. Santa Cruz, in spring. Deep hills with blue clefts. I have come back for the white egrets feeding in a flock on the lawn, darting their bills in that finical stride, gawkily elegant, then suddenly but leisurely sailing to settle, but not too far off, like angels. III I wake at sunrise to angelic screams. And time is measuring my grandchildren's cries and time outpaces the sepia water of the racing creek, time takes its leisure, cunning in the blocked hollows of the pool, the elephantine stones in the leaf-marked lagoon, time sails with the soundless buzzard over the smoking hills and the clouds that fray and change and time waits very quiet between the mountains and the brown tracks in the valleys of the Northern Range, a cover of overhanging bamboo, in Maraval where, if the bed were steeper, a brown stream races or tries to, pooling in rocks, with great avail for me at least, or where a range's blues and indigo over which wide hawks sail their shadows on the wells of Santa Cruz, dark benedictions on the brook's muttering shale, and the horses are slowly plunging their manes as they climb up from the paved-with-lilies pond, so much mythology in their unharnessed necks! These little things take root as I add my praise to the huge lawn at the back of the house, a field, a bright, unaltered meadow, a small savannah for cries and bicycles and joy-crazed dogs bolting after pedalling boys, the crescent ghost of the new moon showing and on the thick slopes this forest like green billowing smoke pierced by the flame petals of the immortelle. IV Petals of the flame tree against ice-cream walls and the arches across the park with its tacit fountain, the old idlers on the benches, this is the prose that spreads like the shade of an immortal banyan in front of the library, the bulk that darkens the violin of twilight when traffic has vanished and nearly over also the colonial regime when the wharves cradled the rocking schooners of our boyhood to the echo of vespers in the alien cathedral. In the hot green silence a dragonfly's drone crossing the scorched hill to the shade of the cedars and spiced laurels, the lauriers canelles, the word itself lifting the plurals of its leaves, from the hot ground, from this page, the singeing smells. How simple to write this after you have gone, that your death that afternoon had the same ease as stopping at the side of the road under the trees to buy cassava bread that comes in two sorts sweet and unsweetened, from the huge cauldron, on the road between Soufrière and Canaries. The heat collects in the depths between the ridges and the high hawks circle in the gathering haze; like consonants round a vowel, insistent midges hum round noun's hexagon, and the hornet's house. Delve in the hot, still valley of Soufrière, the black, baking asphalt and its hedges dripping shade and here is the ultimate nullity despite the moil of the churning vegetation. The small church hidden in leaves. In mid-afternoon, the halt– then dart of a quizzical lizard across the road.

Though each single life occurs in a series of occasions striking only by what blurry context precedes them So come to know what I should have wanted to say—from

Long before the fresh apple crisis, my life had some form to it. I would wake in the mornings—I would perform something. For example, the day I tried, as one with acute passion might, to win one woman over but accidentally won another—that whole time I had been living like someone. Though I can’t remember his name. His model of optimism provided me with a certain geography that I inhabit in time of need. This time the need was surprising. People tend to have faith that the juice they drink in the morning is the same juice they have always drunk. And apples take their shape naturally. The guy, whose name escapes me now, taught me to look upon others’ concerns as mine to make at home. I was fond of doing many things at home, but my favorite was drinking juice. When my friends came by—they liked to suddenly show up with all kinds of breads in their hands, thinking they knew what I needed and planning to force it on me—I had to tell them I was busy with my juice. Two weeks before the crisis, I had been writing some poems about it. It was a warm day, not entirely different from other warm days in San Francisco. People were on the street. Pale people were on the street, making it to the park and lying there such that the next day they were a little browned. The poems I had written were failures, but dense ones. It seemed appropriate to think the person’s attempt at wholeness was a series of missteps, which if drawn across an afternoon might prove interesting to other people. I had a way of reminding my friends that we were all in pain, but a fruit tart kind of pain strangers can’t help but enjoy. That day I had, in a sense, gathered all my possessions and gone out onto the street with them. I awoke that morning with an urgency to prepare myself for something—not anything life threatening, but definitely personal. My lover, then, wanted to spend much of her life asleep. She had no ostensible reaction to the city’s sudden depletion of all its fresh apples and no hope for them. In a world where a person’s tastes revolve around the kind of sleep she gets, I could not find four people who cared. I thought that if I could find those four people we could really do something. A few of my friends pretended they were chosen. A few neighbors felt bad and made offers. My mother called to console me. My lover—in actuality, the closest person to being a member of the encumbered troop, slept next to me. Sleep became our network: falling in and out of it for change. The rule of survival is that no two people can lie in the same bed and sleep at the same time. So I kept an eye on her and played this game of freshness. If by morning I could quickly run out and do seven things that did not involve longing, she would reward me. Before the crisis, the reward would have needed only to be an apple one. But after the apples were gone. The landscape usually contains the solution to what’s lost. Demographics help people in cars. Some people did not notice me. Some demographers lose sleep and do not notice me. That was two days before. The evening before it was two days before the crisis, I was thinking that I did not think I was asleep. I had been watching the sunlight take the corner of my room and my housemate’s cat in it. When I looked again, there was no light—but I had not been asleep. It’s the way people react to traumatic events. They say, “I had just been there” or will say, “She was just with me.” So the loss of light was emotional and the lost state—demographic. I began to trace things by their disappearance. Alone in the room, my memory, and anticipated darkness going for light. People like to talk about the daytime. People in strange moods often miss the daytime. Before the crisis it was not often that one would find me in strange moods. I had managed a particular kind of balance fortified by a certain satisfaction of taste. I was happy. I mean, I was in my juice. Five weeks before the crisis, I was employed at the natural foods grocery around the corner from my house. I did not really work there, but I went there every week. All but the third Sunday of each month, I would walk in and find all kinds of juice on sale. Not to buy, but to stand next to. Shorter people have the privilege of proximity to most cardboard signs. That was one thing. I would stand there and be something for taller people who couldn’t see. I had gotten into the habit of improvised customer service as a way to peruse the juice aisles without being noticed. My parents thought my talents should have led me somewhere. My father would always say, “If you’re not going to be a people person, then numbers will have to do.” He was surprised that with all the time I had on my hands, I chose to spend most of it alone. Numbers then did hold some mystery for me, but mostly too high and far-reaching to explore. For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed. My decision to drink only fresh juice, which costs as much as a small satisfying breakfast, kept me busy rounding up cash. I would have to leave most friendships behind. As a way of keeping my life “wall-free,” I had to divide my time. I would spend the first part of the day searching for volunteer positions in organic juice factories. The second part of my day I would spend telling people about the first part. The other parts are not of substance here. Twenty-five years before the crisis I had for the first time what would eventually become known to me as apple juice. Twenty-three years later a magazine editor would reject my first attempt to recount that experience in litany. I am always drinking in my poems, a good friend says. In the first years of my life, everything I ate was mush. Today I will tolerate only the toughest of green vegetables and date people who will always forget this. When I had that remarkable glass of apple juice, I had no idea that one day I simply would not be able to find it. The city gets rid of its apples. People find themselves inventing fruit. The day I decided to write poems about it—it was twelve days before the rumors began and fourteen days before the media coverage—I had been resting in my best friend’s easy chair. We were discussing the rise of the smoothie industry when something fantastic occurred to me. Five days later I had twenty poems. When a person writes a poem about her passions, people on the street are bound to notice them. The passions overwhelm the body. She carries the body as though it were the book. The friend whose easy chair gave way to my failures moved out of town the next week, and though I miss her it was the failures that saved me. On every other day any kind of crisis one finds particular sayings helpful. If certain words are spoken quietly into a cup of hot water, with the handle of the cup turned toward the wall, whatever strength found in the person may be mirrored in the wall. The person leaves the house with her hand against this wall but strutting slightly. In the alley behind the natural foods grocery, I met my second lover for the first time. Meeting people in vulnerable places accentuates the passion later. Or it may be so hot that the lover never thinks in the present. And the weather was so hot during the crisis. Only the alleys had shade. Forty-eight days into the crisis, while on a thirst strike, I had to make a run for the alley. Not as though people were after me, but the elements. The foundation of anyone feeling that they must get away is need; at the bottom of any body-based need is grace. When I appeared at the opening of the alley, a woman who not twenty-four hours later would be dozing in my bed was stacking crates against the east-side wall. Women who work against surfaces inspire me to do things—I thought about telling her, or—short women make me want things. All the time while I was growing up I put a lot of demands on my juice; forty-eight days into the crisis she made me forget it. I did not forget it, but was embroiled. The newspapers were saying things about the past. People were celebrating thick juice, and I kept writing those poems. That day in the alley I realized three things about life. While assisting her I learned three things to carry around with me, to disperse when needed. For six months during the crisis, I did not care about the crisis. When my faith returned all my lovers were gone. That morning I woke to the two hundred and thirty-second day of the crisis; I was beneath my bed. It was the sixth day that I had awakened beneath my bed. I was lonely, but I was also sure. Life without juice had taken on the name and shape of my weakest character, who—when we passed on the street—did not know me. I knew it was me by the way my head felt: people find themselves in an idea and feel so specified by the idea that they are compelled to show it. Today all my ideas are liquid. That day of my faith, friends thinking I was sick came by to see me. It would be the last day I spent alone; I was happy, but still would not drink. The juice on my mind was no longer juice. There was an absence there, but one so constant it became familiar. I did not want to drink it.

Of  that string of memories about our lost friendship I remember being invited places as a pair, like a comedy team; and after one party, our self-parody of our own stammering speechlessness when introduced to Henrik, the Swedish god auto mechanic; our twin, garish, purple-flowered swimsuits from Kmart, outlining, around Texas, our sameness and differences; our dual waitressing shifts across town, and the long phone calls that followed with their emphatic reiteration of every stingy six-top ordering candy-flavored alcoholic drinks; the after-work visit where we brayed, stomped, then blinked stupidly (while the needle hit the LP’s end) at the empty fifth of gin left on the coffee table, prompting a dim:Uh oh; your imitation of your mother’s habitual and by-the-way inexplicable confession about you to shoe salesmen: She has a funny foot; the apartments, the Olivettis, the boyfriends, all the thoughts exchanged unedited like an experiment of the big, walk-in consciousness, which we might have assumed the verbal equivalent of sex for friends, and whatever closeness meant, we wanted as much as we could have, it was our post-graduate work in The Humanities. Even now, I can’t resist striking up a conversation while standing on line, any line, or introducing myself enthusiastically to whomever I am introduced, but the truth is I am not looking for new friends at this point; I am trying to locate the lost ones, the ones who left through the hole of an argument decades ago, a time more panicked and carefree than any other, except maybe the early years of motherhood, which I missed sharing with you on playground benches. But surely I will see you on the bus someday, and your greeting will package our jokes, advice, tears, book talk, our years of reliance. And so I will expect you will tell me how much I have misunderstood and wrongly assumed in these descriptions, because I never expect those people who have mattered to remain completely gone, even through death, or rebuke. And of course I have to remember what parted us, that I found faults with your other friends, that I spoke as critically and crassly about them as I did about my own person, and to this day I have to be careful of that trait, my junkyard dog of expression, safe only with me on a too-long leash. Here, again, telling you everything with no reason but for memory’s insistence that I string an apology from what I see.

As my Scotch, spared the water, blondly sloshes About its tumbler, and gay manic flame Is snapping in the fireplace, I grow youthful: I realize that calendars aren’t truthful And that for all of my grand unsuccesses External causes are to blame. And if at present somewhat destitute, I plan to alter, prove myself more able, And suavely stroll into the coming years As into rooms with thick rugs, chandeliers, And colorfully pyramided fruit On linened lengths of table. At times I fear the future won’t reward My failures with sufficient compensation, But dump me, aging, in a garret room Appointed with twilit, slant-ceilinged gloom And a lone bulb depending from a cord Suggestive of self-strangulation. Then, too, I have bad dreams, in one of which A cowled, scythe-bearing figure beckons me. Dark plains glow at his back: it seems I’ve died, And my soul, weighed and judged, has qualified For an extended, hyper-sultry hitch Down in eternity. Such fears and dreams, however, always pass. And gazing from my window at the dark, My drink in hand, I’m jauntily unbowed. The sky’s tiered, windy galleries stream with cloud, And higher still, the dazed stars thickly mass In their long Ptolemaic arc. What constellated powers, unkind or kind, Sway me, what far preposterous ghosts of air? Whoever they are, whatever our connection, I toast them (toasting also my reflection), Not minding that the words which come to mind Make the toast less toast than prayer: Here’s to the next year, to the best year yet; To mixed joys, to my harum-scarum prime; To auguries reliable and specious; To times to come, such times being precious, If only for the reason that they get Shorter all the time.