872 Life poems

Last night whistling I passed by their alley, saw them in a sidelong blink of light from traffic, a speeding car, then I went home. Dreamed of gold skies, black money.  I felt so stupid, to talk about them feels stupid.  I’m the sullen red Sun. Bernadette leans from tenement windows, sailors keep searching world after world for Bernadette, and her arms are black, her outstretched proffered palms all milky. From them coins drop into Pickpocket’s pockets freely. Pickpocket’s face is pocked, his arms are pocked.  I threw his face in a lake to make it ripple, he smokes a cigar to an orange hot hole in his face, a glow.  At night the Sun’s a kid brought behind the woodshed and abased.

"After a white reception in the crystal room of the Hotel Kenmore, Mrs. George Eustic (Patricia Hays) and her husband left on a wedding trip to the Pocono Mountains, Pa. They will live in good old Noodleville." (Home.) Where the friendly purple heart is. I like to do things. I like to eat, and things like that. I like the things that go on around me. People are nice. And, really, I like this place I live in. However, some people don't. Sally doesn't. Sick at heart, the trembling girl shuddered at the words that delivered her to this terrible horrible fate of the East. "Nasty!" How could she escape from this oriental monster into whose hands she had fallen—this strange man whose face none had seen. Smile! It is only a little picture, In a little silver frame, And across the back is written My darling mother's name. (Valentine) Pink and purple and orange ones with Venetian rose buds Imported from Venetian In eleven thrilling volumes I heard a shot—I saw him run—then I saw her fall—the woman I love. My leg was broken—and my gun was gone! I had only one thought—(tee! hee!)—his strange, astounding plots must be avenged—he must die for a coward at my hands! He had the courage of a lion and the cunning of a rat. He came running towards me when—suddenly, I— Ran. Forgetting the ripped lace, $35, green violence, & free samples. "I always run when I hear 3 rings!" . . . and remember those swell picnics in Birch Grove?

I think I like this room. The curtains and the furniture aren’t the same Of course, but the light comes in the window as it used to Late in the morning, after the others had gone to work. You can even shave in it. On the dresser with the mirror Are a couple of the pictures we took one afternoon Last May, walking down the alley in the late sunlight. I remember now how we held hands for fifteen minutes Afterwards. The words meander through the mirror But I don’t want them now, I don’t want these abbreviations. What I want in poetry is a kind of abstract photography Of the nerves, but what I like in photography Is the poetry of literal pictures of the neighborhood. The late afternoon sunlight is slanting through the window Again, sketching the room in vague gestures of discontent That roll off the mind, and then only seem to disappear. What am I going to do now? And how am I going to sleep tonight? A peculiar name flickers in the mirror, and then disappears.

After the jostling on canal streets and the orchids blowing in the window I work in cut glass and majolica and hear the plectrum of the angels. My thoughts keep dwelling on the littoral where china clocks tick in the cold shells and the weeds slide in the equinox. The night is cold for love, a chamber for the chorus and the antistrophe of the sealight.

When I brood on Germany in the night No hope for sleep. I know I'll lie Awake with my eyes wide open while Tears scald my cheeks. The years are a blur of past and future: A good twelve of them have passed since I last Laid eyes on my mother—which may be why I'm in such a frenzy to see her. And I am desperate with desire. I am under the old mutter's spell. She circles my mind like a ring of fire. I hope to god she is alive and well. She loves me to pieces, the old woman, And when in her letters her script breaks down, I know she's shaken to her depths, I know When the mother in her's shocked by her role. My mother never leaves my mental space Free of time past, the twelve long years, Twelve! —that vanished without a trace Since our last satisfying hug and kiss. Don't worry about Germany: it's the picture Of health. It will outlast us. All and all. I'll know its borders again by the flare Of its barbarous oaks and lime-trees' salute. I wouldn't waste a moment thinking on Germany were it not for my mother...; Fatherland-is-forever; but the old Woman, being mortal, may soon grow...cold. Since I left the country death has taken Many I loved. And now the unbreathing Impinge too much upon my sympathy. Numbering the dead does me in. And yet I feel compelled to count and each Body added to the tally has a say In how my mourning grows: hordes of corpses Crush my chest. What—relief—when they...give way. Praise the lord. And the lighter light of France That through this window breaks as my wife, well- Tempered, radiant as dawn, dispels My German burden with her lovely smile. after Heinrich Heine

I. I like to travel to L.A. by myself My trips to the crowded smoggy polluted by brown indigenous and immigrant haze are healing. I travel from one pollution to another. Being urban I return to where I came from My mother survives in L.A. Now for over forty years. I drive to L.A. in the darkness of the day on the road before CHP one with the dark driving my black truck invisible on my journey home. The dark roads take me back to my childhood riding in the camper of daddy’s truck headed home. My brother, sister and I would be put to sleep in the camper and sometime in the darkness of the day daddy would clime into the cab with mom carrying a thermos full of coffee and some Pendleton blankets And they would pray before daddy started the truck for journey mercies. Often I’d rise from my lullaby sleep and stare into the darkness of the road the long darkness empty of cars Glowy from daddy’s headlights and lonesome from Hank Williams’ deep and twangy voice singing of cold nights and cheatin’ hearts. About an hour from Flagstaff the sun would greet us and the harsh light would break the darkness and we’d be hungry from travel and for being almost home. II. I know the darkness of the roads endless into the glowy path before me lit by the moon high above and the heat rising from my truck’s engine. The humming from tires whisper mile after mile endless alongside roadside of fields shadowy from glow. I know the darkness of the roads It swims through my veins dark like my skin and silenced like a battered wife. I know the darkness of the roads It floods my liver pollutes my breath yet I still witness the white dawning.

Chico whines, no reason why. Just now walked, dinner gobbled, head and ears well scratched. And yet he whines, looking up at me as if confused at my just sitting here, typing away, while darkness is stalking the back yard. How can I be so blind, he wants to know, how sad, how tragic, how I won’t listen before it is too late. His whines are refugees from a brain where time and loss have small dominion, but where the tyranny of now is absolute. I get up and throw open the kitchen door, and he disappears down the cement steps, barking deeper and darker than I remember. I follow to find him perfectly still in the empty yard— the two of us in the twilight, standing guard.

All summer, the city engine's low roar capsizes our bodies into sleep, groans, evacuation— Lost to a watery anamnesis so warm it requires a raft thatched from death's flotsam to necklace its shore I swim on, calling your name In my dreams, something is always deserting But tonight, no fast shadows of birds No oceanic flowers disrobing butterflies or bright beach of child's porridge and bones— Instead, someone weaving a net from fallen hair in and around our bed to catch the breath, blood, and ritual motions that oiled us as one candle in a cave In your dreams, someone is always resisting being saved My teethare on fire, you say I said Don't fly for the labyrinth, once I thought you were admonishing me to go away I don't remember most others, a thousand seasons phonographed in through a wounded window Everyone can't have a cactus Just o.k. empty all the rice from my legs

in my house. Days we’re ordinary, affectionate, a close, happy couple, but nights require a passport and serious immunizations, warnings about security and guerilla attacks. You are a foreign ruler, quite possibly benevolent in intention – but we know how these things always play out, don’t we? – with needs alien to and hostile to your citizenry, me, without power except to say, “No more,” and hope to survive the fallout from the battles in the streets. Days, we’re the peaceful, devoted pair all our friends envy. Nights are always tense around the DMZ that is our bed with occasional forays into the bush where the enemy is always lying in wait. Sleep is hard, fearful and troubled. I dream us going down in flames.

Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English). —Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey 1 Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards, click of pearls upon a polished nightstand soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull of the self and the soul in the darkness chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence. Deep is the water and long is the moonlight inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink, building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon. Deep is the darkness and long is the night, solid the water and liquid the light. How strange that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth. 2 Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate, a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox, a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric, a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost. Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters, or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop, or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget, barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back, the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot, always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable. 3 In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint. In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong. In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream. In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants. In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust. In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices. In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar. In the night I will become an infant before your flag.