872 Life poems

what for the rush and bloody pain what for the blooming and the rain what for the quest and odyssey what for the swimming and the sea, see there b no shore or beach that anyone can reach and breathe, inhale, exhale, and love all seems to ooze the stress that greed has carved in us surely our species should be meek before our motherearth’s volcanoes storms and huracanes tornadoes, floods and tremors and there we b secreting poisons for all leggeds, wingeds, fish and even trees what for the rush and bloody pain we’ll surely die, but then we dig deeper in our heartmindspiritbody and nurture glow and warmth and light and peace and patience and gladness and gardens and gather all in oneness and end the pain and bloody rush desiring naught expecting naught missing naught simply being being we truly have no choice…though we imagine, dream, hope, want being all that we are we are all that is and that is all there b césar and corky this b my writ to chávez y gonzález carnales de las sonrisas grandes de las carcajadas llenas de murales de cuadros, ensayos matadors de pendejadas terminators of guandajos and juanabees hermanos, jefes your “death” is but our “birth” porque amasteis entregasteis y hoy, como siempre, sois imprescindibles

The heretic’s papers were spread out on the armchair * At the window, fruit of spring, you can bite again against the weather weapons I let fall outside pharmacies, drowsy and bright * Air comes to the confused bends in the rail where in a mirror lush food puts you out for 1 night. Then it is the weather at noon that prepares to spring on you in December, a month ago blowing the lights out with a sob * On long walks a poorly tuned radio in my world     my  head with a star attached swims back * Useless—it was the wrong tree but the flag in the school breeze scans the men and women on my sleeve * A . . . turned her head towards the open window of the shop. The voice was low. It did not sound like a man’s voice. * Eighteen trees starting from the end of the block outside the pharmacy, with beards today to the subway, station, steps of a land-post “screen my heart” * Under the dog’s neck When the radio went on. Doctor He moved his face away to The pines, a deep thought. The trees, for a few seconds they were Real to him, his ears stopped The river where no life could touch him. He pressed his ear against the cold Shrill whine. Dusty legs Wondered why they had sent him To this place, they feared the cobwebs Were swaying on the unique bed. Mown grass has the peppery smell Of being crowded together on This bed, and a feeling of dark apprehension Came over him. I watch a horse Gather speed, look at a movie With you. Your words are the grime On the sidestreet, down towards the river, Yellow in the cold glare of floodlights In the yard. In the middle of the line I repeated your instructions, I puzzled with a stranger does to you In a dream. Chunks Of meat are marked Cars following me as a thought follows Us from the motel. Father Has read these latinized titles Aloud, but failed And gave place to some smooth yellowish substance, Checked by no one as he rubbed the sponge- Like doll. It had some hair But its legs did not tempt me, The sponginess gave place to the tubes themselves. Colleagues efficiently solve an aggressive Blank to be expected as we sat at the breakfast Table near the door. A tree blocked Her hair spread and fell over the wheel. But the living room shows its trimming of thick straw— The bad mechanic sets the bread on the white cloth

Dusty and treeless, the street sloped beneath us. Somewhere a hammer made thunderclaps, forging the night-sky. Then the children, seeing us, dashed from the Moorish houses, vigorously shouting, vying for position, while the bravest, in worn underpants and plastic sandals, climbed a high crater-like wall and plunged, with murderous cries, into the Roman pool where blue-lipped fish waited. Ah, those glorious soaked heads, spiked like palm fronds! Seeing one in our group clutch her purse— repelled by the wet black princes who shivered in circles of yellow mud and begged from us— I felt ashamed. In the brief African twilight, a canary chirped something shrewdly about avarice. Far off, in the little neighborhood where I grew—with neat cement walkways and crab-apple blossoms— money ran through the fingers of our house, with nothing much to record its loss but unhappiness: one of us ironing servilely, one of us sobbing in a bedroom, one of us sleeping on a rifle, one of us seizing another by the hair, demanding the animal-like submission we thought was love. Sunday evening. Mother is wearing a big cotton shift and tweezing her eyebrows. Her head is a thicket of hairpins. In the round hand-mirror that parodies her face, the world looks greater than it is. I am next to bathe in the water of the poor earth, reused by each of us in order of birth. Gray with sodium and grit, it covers me like a black robe, and yet I feel exalted. Soon the violent rain, like wet Sahara sand, would fall, scrubbing the hot labyrinthine corridors of shuttered houses and aimless dogs, where the sparse life is purgative and inexhaustible, where little pilfering hands moved freely in and out of my trouser pockets, though there were no diamonds except those the eyes mined.

He heard in curtains of sleet cleaving from magnolia leaves encrypted Aztec frequencies, he said. When the sun god liquors loose each ashen tongue the planet tattles. We are advised to listen: this he'd grunt to signal his dwindling fuse and the bartender would show him the door. In his honor I tune my form to the emanations of this vibrant life: Either someone's dropped a blue coin and I've picked up the murmur of its ribs—a quarter kiltering beneath the blond brick arcade of the whispering gallery at Grand Central—or someone's table is ready. No matter that I set my phone to airplane while I thumb these lines, I can still be reached by tender thought: a dirgeful brass cortège stirs the ear inside my chest. The man has passed. I got the text today, and now feel at least obliged to observe silence. Observe this café thick with humid bodies, mugs wafting florets of breath, steam revealing patterns in the glassy chatter. For that he is a phantasm rumoring now a timeless doom, quiet as the carousel of a partial print. For that he is finally transcendent. For that we convened for drinks by some clockwork of urban chance each week, my year adrift in the East Village. For that I renounced him, and now regret having done so. For that I vibed with his passions—more, the deeper we reached in our cups, rifling our mind's files for magical thinking and secrets in our blood's chemical record. I've traveled years through boot-black redactions of thought to find his apparition greet me with a raised fist in the dream of a leather trench coat that crunches like gravetop snow, dream of the self-schooled on secondary sources. He hung a cardboard pyramid to cover the bed in which he slept and quested visions toward the headwaters of paranoia: nightsweats of tar, drumbeats marooned in the distant hills, Legba tapping his cane on the edge of sanity. If you see something. What a fear of hobgoblins and philistines can blind our better senses. At the table beside me children play mosquito tones they say are there, but I am unable to hear.

Therefore, no more recounting of dreams, a routine thing that bores with expectations of invention, unfiltered non sequiturs, unusual embraces only from the practiced young woman who everyday remembers being a bride, she is changing behind that white curtain Leora fifteen again experiencing prematurely the pure suckling of a baby fifteen with a virgin desire for pure suckling something to do with jasmine with jasmine tea existing only without accident It blooms while Leora sleeps when she sleeps at night and it is also dark for the jasmine four hours of tea sucking on blossoms, Cestrum nocturnum like colostrums: the earliest secretions, and then only milk from mother —there it is seven times over jasmine bath after jasmine bath till the tea can get no better highest grade as stasis all As gets so boring, ka-put to the test of innovation all the right answers Leora sees herself mermaid, eel, tiger fish from waist down form-fitting skirt of winks under that bonefish or ladyfish profile: tail fins already split, caught in transition from legs to fin hybrid mutant bastard mestizo mulatto masala mule mix mutt hm/bm/mmmmm watered down (jasmine bath tea) spiked (jasmine bath tea) stands taller on tips of split tail fin ps: pastiche, salmagundi when all dressed up Leg and fin share custody so young men sacrifice only below the belt to please her many wounded soldiers her company From now on storming the beaches rocks already aftermath, the breaking of dozens of sphinxes the taming of sandstone lions and griffins, gargoyles Leora takes to breast anything capable of sucking and being filled, no ban on leeches and vipers that stick out like misplaced overdeveloped hairs and while in position, her free hand shaves the heads of Medusa’s children screaming for more nursing with her eyes closed, her free handy blade, sharpened life line The liquids of history therefore tend to ferment; the beverages for walks down memory lane therefore become pungent cheeses and wines, the odes to bitterness and sweetness happen. This is also desirable. Taste depends on how the glass tilts, how tongue curls. What’s difficult is maintaining gaps as gaps. A sustainable nothingness. But something enters. Sustainable nothingness looks like a niche. Ghosts and spirits of what’s been lost. A young woman looks over her shoulder. Close watching of what’s fading does not mean the change from substance to spirit would be observed. On the tippy-tips of split tail fin looking over her shoulder a long line for the nurse, exceptional business, nonstop nursing and the milk won’t stop, years are at the end of the line. Pull the plug on a nearby respirator (how on earth?) (don’t assume location, location, location) the substance travels the line joins the community of electricity, colonies of gigantic storms on the sun and appearances in auroras that the mermaid sits under as under any canopy nonstop The spell of the tide tailored to make the one falling under its influence fall more willingly. It feels nothing like falling at all: Leora describes rehabilitation Sand sparkles remembering having been alive only once Leora’s eyes sparkle upon contact with crabs and their incredible redness that ought to teach her something about fire she does not know with top-heavy ways of knowing (the brain should travel the stations of the body, and one day the eyes and navel, when the eyes accompany the brain, line up in a row) —then a real reason for revision Dream on Accordingly, pureness of the situation milks its own purity Fantastic and looks disgusting (no matter where the eyes are—candidate for truth) but purity is still pure following such a milking The mermaid’s pregnancy has to be called immaculate after repeated searches for the limits. Lost without those. Pure. Last resort and best explanation for birth of a human baby from a mermaid without a human pelvis or womb. The best xrays cannot find them. Machines arrive on the beach and leave defective. Leora continues nursing her baby first in line The milk is pure. It does not need to be pasteurized. Makes                               (empty) no one ill. Nothing in it allows allergies. The chemistry                                       (empty) of the milk is pure.                                                                                         (empty) The molecules of the tabernacle of purity. (as if they are empty)                                                                  (nothing is right here) Law Flattened out they are like flattened tetrahedrons, probably are smashed pendulums now Leora blessed with impossibility of the usual kind of rape her own brand jasmine bath after jasmine bath without legs she does as much sitting as anyone who ever sat on a throne wheelchairs keep evolving

We danced to rancorous tunes on spiked ground and our knees sang with each puncture, so that several agouti colonies, melanic in our russet strengths, learned as wild rats to scurry or guard ourselves from skin-spite. Immune from nocturnal drowsiness we strong-bellied creatures assembled, campaigned; gyrated to blowed trumpets and cradled songs, but, us black rats with our rogue swagger that spoke of foreign ports, pranced our survival shuffle in night’s murky dance halls. Each step our single prayer, each jab our benediction. This tart sermon containered our septic hurts and lean swaggers. On the strike of dawn, we skittered from shadows, the redeemed walking day’s straight-road into warpland.

As with this Jet Ski family braiding the lake with bigger and bigger shocks until the one car-sized one cuts his engine and, following him, for an instant they all coast through silences of self-made rain— how much is required now to carve, out of the general livable quiet, independence?

How exhilarating it was to march along the great boulevards in the sunflash of trumpets and under all the waving flags— the flag of ambition, the flag of love. So many of us streaming along— all of humanity, really— moving in perfect step, yet each lost in the room of a private dream. How stimulating the scenery of the world, the rows of roadside trees, the huge curtain of the sky. How endless it seemed until we veered off the broad turnpike into a pasture of high grass, headed toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality. Generation after generation, we keep shouldering forward until we step off the lip into space. And I should not have to remind you that little time is given here to rest on a wayside bench, to stop and bend to the wildflowers, or to study a bird on a branch— not when the young are always shoving from behind, not when the old keep tugging us forward, pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.

Because anyone sitting still attracts desire, Even this will not be given you, the park In June, the silence of a bench at eleven o’clock On a Monday morning, or four on a Thursday afternoon. Someone will drift toward you, unattached And lonely. The spell will be broken, the wrong word said. It is cool, but there is no death in the few token leaves That must have come down last night, in the rain that freshened, The tree-smell that remains. For this season there is no name, Not summer, and none of the months of the year— A something inside you. Search your mind For the green arboriferous Word the boys and girls swing out of Like a tree, and the lovers On the grass in tantric mode, in an ecstasy Of untouching, and the human buddhas, legs infolded, reading. Branches, sheer translucent leaves— You would die to get under them forever, if it were given you, The park, on this, a day like any other day, And not the knowledge of everyone ever met Who will come upon you, sooner or later, If only you stay here. No, not people, or the walkways Made in another century, or the murmur of the great city Everywhere in the distance, but this breathing-space Where the void no longer terrible But to be relaxed in, the depressions Which anyway here are mild, incoming from the west, Slow-acting, chronic, lifelong not acute Are there to be sat through, waited out On a damp bench, as a man sweeps up around you And the sun comes out in real time, stealing over the ground.

Make them say yes before you even ask, L’essence de charme,c’est ça. The mind’s a damsel Locked in a tower with her fathom of   hair. Coax the braid and it’ll all be over. The rooms are plain where I am interviewed, Abstract and clinical, and so I glory Like a corpse plant, perfume the marble-faced With the reek and prodigy of my tomorrows. Dying is so boring as the soul Rummages the liquidation sale For a final bargain — But time outbids all comers, and we die Expensively in Princess Margaret Who was herself once so beautiful.