872 Life poems

In the first taxi he was alone tra-la, No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride. In the second taxi he was alone tra-la But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped according And the cabby from out his muffler said: ‘Make sure You have left nothing behind tra-la between you’. In the third taxi he was alone tra-la But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes. As for the fourth taxi, he was alone Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked Through him and said: ‘I can’t tra-la well take So many people, not to speak of the dog.’

Where ever something breathes Heart beating the rise and fall Of mountains, the waves upon the sky Of seas, the terror is our ignorance, that’s Why it is named after our home, earth Where art is locked between Gone and Destination The destiny of some other where and feeling The ape knew this, when his old lady pulled him up Off the ground. Was he grateful, ask him he’s still sitting up there Watching the sky’s adventures, leaving two holes for his own. Oh sing Gigantic burp past the insects, swifter than the ugly Stanleys on the ground Catching monkey meat for Hyenagators, absolute boss of what does not Arrive in time to say anything. We hear that eating, that doo dooing, that Burping, we had a nigro mayor used to burp like poison zapalote Waddled into the cave of his lust. We got a Spring Jasper now, if you don’t like that woid, what about courtesan, dreamed out his own replacement sprawled Across the velvet cash register of belching and farting, his knick names when they let him be played with. Some call him Puck, was love, we thought, now a rubber Flat blackie banged across the ice, to get past our Goli, the Africannibus of memory. Here. We have so many wedged between death and passivity. Like eyes that collide With reality and cannot see anything but the inner abstraction of flatus, a biography, a car, a walk to the guillotine, James the First, Giuliani the Second When he tries to go national, senators will stab him, Ides of March or Not. Maybe Both will die, James 1 and Caesar 2, as they did in the past, where we can read about The justness of their assassinations As we swig a little brew and laugh at the perseverance Of disease at higher and higher levels of its elimination. We could see anything we wanted to. Be anything we knew how to be. Build anything we needed. Arrive anywhere we should have to go. But time is as stubborn as space, and they compose us with definition, time place and 
condition. The howlees the yowlees the yankees the super left streamlined post racial ideational chauvinists creeep at the mouth of the venal cava. They are protesting 
fire and Looking askance at the giblets we have learned to eat. “It’s nobody’s heart,” they say, and we agree. It’s the rest of some thing’s insides. Along with the flowers, the grass, the tubers, the river, pieces of the sky, earth, our seasoning, baked throughout. What do you call that the anarchist of comfort asks, Food, we say, making it up as we chew. Yesterday we explained language.

That this is the morning in which nothing much that the sky is still there and the water dresses accordingly that only at night does the water rest vanish from sight that the stars are too small too far to register there that all our names too are writ invisibly on water that abiding requires more hope than I can possibly acquire that hope is not a thing with feathers that hope is a thing with a fist a thin crust sketched over oceans that hope is what despair uses for bait come in hope says the water's fine that hope is the blood with which you write letters that start dear sea dear ocean stop asking so fucking much that hope is a telegram delivered by men in pairs men in uniform a telegram that says missing stop that says once again presumed lost stop

He crackles the air in big fist because it is turning, the night’s spine and the fast floor of last year is now the wall of this Those cracks should be flowers but there is no light nor lights in the windless binnacle strewn a slow rate of thought in the broad attention What is shorn to say and then to leave awake in the sleep, the pen without its cap the numbers that will harm if not arrayed The windows are not blank, the dark not empty but solid as the mask held loose before the eyeless active ridden hive The sounds of the mind entire are the wind below at the valley floor then a thumping above as of rocks at work painting the wall Turn out the lights and think invisibly stain the turn of time and hear the year before it’s there

In a doorway Staring at rain Simple withstands Time on his hands

I live a small life, barely bigger than a speck, barely more than a blip on the radar sweep though it is not nothing, as the garter snake climbs the rock rose shrub and the squirrel creeps on bramble thorns. Not nothing to the crows who heckle from the crowns of the last light’s trees winterstripped of green, except for the boles that ivy winds each hour round. See, the world is busy and the world is quick, barely time for a spider to suck the juice from a hawk moth’s head so it can use the moth as a spindle that it wraps in fiber while the moth constricts until it’s thin as a stick you might think was nothing, a random bit caught in a web coming loose from the window frame, in wind.

Eventually, I grab the back-door key from the cup-holder, slip a folded list into my pocket. Inside, I dig through closets to find the lincoln logs, the cardinal statue, the clock shaped like an elephant, a kettle— but the whole time I half expect to hear her: the careful shuffle of her slow, flat feet; her walker's unpredictable clap; her voice trembling with evangelical vibrato. Beside the bed, I find a King James Bible, her careful marginalia penciled in: Glory! Glory! Amen! I set it down. I shouldn't want it just because it's hers.

I am forced to sleepwalk much of the time. We hold on to these old ways, are troubled sometimes and then the geyser goes away, time gutted. In and of itself there is no great roar, force pitted against force that makes up in time what it loses in speed. The waterfalls, the canyon, a royal I-told-you-so comes back to greet us at the beginning. How was your trip? Oh I didn’t last you see, folded over like the margin of a dream of the thing-in-itself. Well, and what have we come to? A paper-thin past, just so, and ‘tis pity. We regurgitate old anthems and what has come to pass, and why dwell on these. Why make things more difficult than they already are? Because if it’s boring in a different way, that’ll be interesting too. That’s what I say. That rascal, he jumped over the fence. I’m wiping my pince-nez now. Did you ever hear from the one who said he’d be back once it was over, who eluded me even in my sleep? That was a particularly promising time, we thought. Now the sun’s out and it’s raining again. Just like a day from the compendium. I’ll vouch for you, and we can go on scrolling as though nothing had risen, the horizon forest looks back at us. The preacher shook his head, the evangelist balanced two spools at the end of his little makeshift rope. We’d gone too far. We’d have to come back in a day or so.

The phantom happiness I sought O’er every crag and moor; I paused at every postern gate, And knocked at every door; In vain I searched the land and sea, E’en to the inmost core, The curtains of eternal night Descend—my search is o’er.

A clear choice is so sweet. Not reluctance but real resistance. Joy-to-bursting, or none. Grief, not gradations. Someone essential and someone not. A good, dark strike-through versus weighing everything at the end of each day. Look, a cat killed a cardinal on an emerald lawn. For so many reasons it shouldn't have been beautiful. But that's also the kind of book I like best.