872 Life poems

Yellow pines    No ever    no green    except where stems brown needles green    I walk on the wooden train    The fall’s water you swam in one cold morning    What you braved    That ice path    A horse fence    Where fences are horses with long hair    I braid the tale of the fall of stables Four paws touch dirt    stirring a flirt of sky a bundle of rare    You bundle into stables    I open with sandy tongue taste the grain of barkwater I look at myself in a mirror of weather Rain trenzas    Dirt cups us    We drink & spin like tornillos    A swallow’s nest    like an adobe tornado    Shit & mud & feathers & forming pitchfork claws Eggshells gone    We rest in the ocean smalls the pink throat The back door is also the front    The only smoke hole    Feathers rise & we follow

I swear my way now will be to continue without plan or hope, to accept the drift of things, to shift from endless effort to joy in, say, that robin, plunging into the mossy shallows of my bird bath and splashing madly till the air shines with spray. Joy it will be, say, in Nancy, pretty in pink and rumpled T-shirt, rubbing sleep from her eyes, or joy even in just this breathing, free of fright and clutch, knowing how one’s ship comes in with each such breath.

Home from town the two of them sit looking over what they have bought spread out on the kitchen table like gifts to themselves. She holds a card of buttons against the new dress material and asks if they match. The hay is dry enough to rake, but he watches her empty the grocery bag. He reads the label on a grape jelly glass and tries on the new straw hat again.

Maybe the light from a small window Tucked at the utmost eave of the barn Could be misunderstood; if only I had pulled In by the other way or not looked up Against such darkness. The animal I brought Into this no longer mine, the task Each day was to confine enough, from harm Or from each other as night loosens Over the assemblage. But in the pasture One wrong step was taken. And those who remain Are weary, heads low, torment nowhere To be seen, not even in the illumination Of men who have come to help, Who behind the double doors keep watch By the body so it does not become Anything for those who scavenge, to follow back The acts of blood right up to the locked stall And light where each shaft lands precisely again Through the again. The horse was in the snow, The rock was underfoot; all the unknowables Made whole and apparent by one who stumbled.

¿Sólo una sombra?/Only a Shadow (Ester IV)?, from the series Santos y sombras/Saints and Shadows, 1993–1994, by Muriel Hasbun My daughter gathers the seeds she finds in our desert, calls them spirits —the spirits are us, she says when I worry those orbs in my fingers to conjure her birth. The wind’s first thought is to craft those seeds: vessels when the tree worries she’s not enough of a multiplicity, that she will burn into the cosmos. The cosmos is no thought, no worry, more than us, but less than wind, and the wind is only the infinite, not the body’s death, which is, after all, only a particle, but time formless as space. This is only if the wind worries at all. The seed doesn’t think — she is the doubling ambition of a vessel. In the wind, the idea of the copy is translated by time. We were once that idea. My daughter collects me in a box marked for spirits where I unsettle the other seeds begging for wind so that my sound will echo a thousand miles away. My daughter was the pulse I toss into the wind with the seeds. Particles of us pass over like whispers from the cosmos, the clatter the wind makes. I worry birds will take her into themselves, that she’ll become a fleck of their transience, but this is how we furrow ourselves into the cosmos, the twine of our breaths into wind, into carbon, into the tree’s colossal fingers reaching back from under the earth.

Bless Tuesday, blessed Monday. Bless the word week, its seven small days trail with y. Bless the men whose words I was too young to hear. A whisper loves a canal. Bless my laugh, lent by grief, I have so little left to borrow. But my hair, it grows— if hair be gold, cut mine so I might rid my beloved of his student loans. Bless thieves, universities, those hands caress what’s not theirs. Bless thinking it was yours. Here are hands, blessed one. Bless them holding the door. Bless each crier on the F train before and after me as they blush, as they transfer into tunnels for the red line. Oh bless, bless wildly, what remains to be done. Bless the one who told me so, the ones who didn’t. Even weak breaths bless. Bless weakness, fragile fortress, my friend’s body absent of soundness. Bless the sound of someone reliable answering your call, saying If you’re going through hell, Hello.

Open the gates—the gates of the Temple, Swift to Thy sons, who Thy truths have displayed. Open the gates—the gates that are hidden, Swift to Thy sons, who Thy Law have obeyed. Open the gates—of the coveted Temple, Swift to Thy sons who confess and seek grace. Open the gates—of the armies celestial, Swift to Thy sons, Judah’s tearful-eyed race. Open the gates—the radiant portals, Swift to Thy sons who are lovely and pure. Open the gates—of the crown of fidelity, Swift to Thy sons who in God rest secure.

Open, Time, and let him pass Shortly where his feet would be! Like a leaf at Michaelmas Swooning from the tree, Ere its hour the manly mind Trembles in a sure decrease, Nor the body now can find Any hold on peace. Take him, weak and overworn; Fold about his dying dream Boyhood, and the April morn, And the rolling stream: Weather on a sunny ridge, Showery weather, far from here; Under some deep-ivied bridge, Water rushing clear: Water quick to cross and part, (Golden light on silver sound), Weather that was next his heart All the world around! Soon upon his vision break These, in their remembered blue; He shall toil no more, but wake Young, in air he knew. He has done with roods and men. Open, Time, and let him pass, Vague and innocent again, Into country grass.

Opportunity I love you Windows and watermelons march down the street The air is nobody Sky is in position I am ready to endure my freedom A riderless horse on a saffron plain A lake that spins A tree that lets the wind decide

I do not know if, climbing some steep hill, Through fragrant wooded pass, this glimpse I bought, Or whether in some mid-day I was caught To upper air, where visions of God’s will In pictures to our quickened sense fulfil His word. But this I saw. A path I sought Through wall of rock. No human fingers wrought The golden gates which opened sudden, still, And wide. My fear was hushed by my delight. Surpassing fair the lands; my path lay plain; Alas, so spell-bound, feasting on the sight, I paused, that I but reached the threshold bright, When, swinging swift, the golden gates again Were rocky wall, by which I wept in vain.