873 Life poems

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.

When i blow open green bottles straight across hump of a frozen tongue when i shove brown glass through skull of a possum and pass from my ears a baptism of red piss when i cry from my butt like a jackal and throw limbs of a dying mule into the river when i spit venom from the head burn codeine into a cosmetic paste and grieve into a wax of dried bulls when my mystical bunions jam eyes into searching spit of a starving wolf into cosmic lips like monkey genitals And i receive my pickled turned skeleton of rusty chains in the bodega i receive a symbolic heart made of five middle fingers in the bodega i receive a teeth parade of yellow roses to leave the bodega and cross the rio grande onto the flatbead bones of a musty nighttrain I say to see me loosen jaws like a snake to see me exhausted after a few strikes to see me pay dirt to the ice hog in my masai-pachuca-doo squatting on a pillow of old zoot suits squatting among the names and breeds breaking down cheeks dotted on this night train and i say i dream of the 1943 riots I say i dream in a hailstorm of riots And i say riots dream into a mass of skins stooping on flatbed bones of a funky nighttrain And when i siphon sweat for fuel from this patron saint of chronic diarrhea When i turn this rubber face into a spotted puma and take on the forceful winds of the prune pickers When my laughter dominates the last seat And i burn labor contracts into brown port caca Then I approach in mother of pearl and human blood in father of smoking and coughing throats and in my jelly of coyote strings who is to say what when i approach I mean somewhere along the road in this cold cold chicken shit somewhere along the road in this wasted body somewhere along the road eat stocks, bonds feathers somewhere along the road confiscate borders from wild dogs somewhere along the road shove them into the imperial valley somewhere along the road cry hard and let this night train sink its rundown rectum of electric chairs into heaven and say fuck it I see a way through the maroon glass of this milky way I say i see a way through for the cradle of hulls sticking through these indigo ankles I see a way through for these torn shoes stinking like dead cats I see a way through for these blood-streaked legs I say i see a way through for these pus-riddled holes in their suction-cup lips and when i pass through toothless combs coming from armpits of the bodega when i pass through bats on corkscrews coming from the bodega when i push my mortified flesh from this bodega and walk with the mildew of an old zoot suit walk tall in my mud-packed-masai-pachuca-doo walk among the survivors from the musty nighttrains fuck it I say dreams are like riots i say we dream in a hailstorm of riots and I say riots dream into a mass of skins coming from flatbed bones of the funky funky nighttrains

After Heinrich I. F. Biber I What’s unseen may not exist— Or so those secret powers insist That prowl past nightfall, Enabled by the brain’s blacklist To fester out of sight, So we streak from bad to worse, Through an expanding universe And see no evil. On my rounds like a night nurse Or sentry on qui vive, I make, through murkier hours, my way Where the sun patrolled all day Toward stone-blind midnight To poke this flickering flashlamp’s ray At what’s hushed up and hidden. Lacking all leave or protocol, Things, one by one, hear my footfall, Blank out their faces, Dodge between trees, find cracks in walls Or lock down offices. Still, though scuttling forces flee Just as far stars recede from me To outmost boundaries, I stalk through ruins and debris, Graveyard and underground. Led by their helmetlantern’s light Miners inch through anthracite; I’m the unblinking mole That sniffs out what gets lost or might Slip down the world’s black hole. II (ending his rounds, the watchman, somewhat tipsy, returns) What’s obscene?—just our obsessed, Incessant itch and interest In things found frightful: In bestial tortures, rape, incest; In ripe forbidden fruit Dangling, lush, just out of reach; Dim cellars nailed up under each Towering success, The loser’s envy that will teach A fierce vindictiveness, The victors’ high court that insures Pardon for winners and procures Little that’s needed But all we lust for. What endures?— Exponential greed And trash containers overflowing With shredded memos, records showing What, who, when, why ’Til there’s no sure way of knowing What’s clear to every eye: The heart’s delight in hatred, runny As the gold drip from combs of honey; The rectal intercourse Of power politics and money That slimes both goal and source. What’s obscured?—what’s abscessed. After inspection, I’d suggest It’s time we got our head Rewired. I plan to just get pissed, Shitfaced and brain-dead.

Under a heavy wire milk case, A piece of concrete foundation On top, in summer, in her backyard, Mrs. Russo keeps the cat Nikita safe From birds, from dogs, from eating Johnson grass, which he throws up. Nikita waits for ants to wander in And for the sun to leave. Instead, she comes to keep him Company, saying You look fat And that her son died, Remember I told you? Walking thin in his uniform On a road.

(Too sound of mind) The paper table cloth was tastefully bleak, The misty morning light shone on his cheek, And made him look alone and masculine. He talked of Seneca and bad translations, Of modern critics' lightweight observations; A bread crumb rested sweetly on his chin. Behind him, through the glass, the ocean's heave Uncurled against the sand, beside his sleeve, As Eros aimed his toxic javelin. I ducked out of the way, to no avail; It glanced my flesh, injecting quite a cocktail That blurred my sight and caused my head to spin— Never mind the coffee we were drinking, Whatever I said was not what I was thinking. I wanted to become his mandolin, And lie across his lap, a dainty lute, And sing to him and feed him ripened fruit, While light upon the sea turned opaline. Instead, this conversation about art And formal education—God, he's smart! Such rationality should be a sin. The hour was up, he had to run, of course; A handshake and a peck of shy remorse— Outside, the sea was gray and dull as tin; It ruled the shore with tedious discipline.

Words can bang around in your head Forever, if you let them and you give them room. I used to love poetry, and mostly I still do, Though sometimes “I, too, dislike it.” There must be Something real beyond the fiddle and perfunctory Consolations and the quarrels—as of course There is, though what it is is difficult to say. The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees. I didn’t know what it was, and I don’t know now, But it was what I started out to do, and now, a lifetime later, All I’ve really done. The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Rivers and Mountains : I sat in my room Alone, their fragments shored against the ruin or revelation That was sure to come, breathing in their secret atmosphere, Repeating them until they almost seemed my own. We like to think our lives are what they study to become, And yet so much of life is waiting, waiting on a whim. So much of what we are is sheer coincidence, Like a sentence whose significance is retrospective, Made up out of elementary particles that are in some sense Simply sounds, like syllables that finally settle into place. You probably think that this is a poem about poetry (And obviously it is), yet its real subject is time, For that’s what poetry is—a way to live through time And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back. *     *     * A paneled dining room in Holder Hall. Stage right, enter twit: “Mr. Ashbery, I’m your biggest campus fan.” We hit it off And talked about “The Skaters” and my preference for “Clepsydra” Vs. “Fragment.” Later on that night John asked me to a party in New York, And Saturday, after dinner and a panel on the artist’s role as something (And a party), driving Lewis’s Austin-Healey through the rain I sealed our friendship with an accident. The party was on Broadway, An apartment (white of course, with paintings) just downstairs From Frank O’Hara’s, who finally wandered down. I talked to him A little about Love Poems (Tentative Title) , which pleased him, And quoted a line from “Poem” about the rain, which seemed to please him too. The party ended, John and I went off to Max’s, ordered steaks And talked about our mothers. All that talking!—poems and paintings, Parents, all those parties, and the age of manifestos still to come! I started coming to New York for lunch. We’d meet at Art News , Walk to Fifty-sixth Street to Larre’s, a restaurant filled with French expatriates, Have martinis and the prix fixe for $2.50 (!), drink rose de Provence And talk (of course) about Genet and James and words like “Coca-Cola.” It was an afternoon in May when John brought up a play That he and Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara—Holy Trinity! ( Batman was in vogue)—had started years ago and never finished. There was a dictator named Edgar and some penicillin, But that’s all I remember. They hadn’t actually been together In years, but planned to finish it that night at John’s new apartment On Ninety-fifth Street, and he said to come by for a drink Before they ate and got to work. It was a New York dream Come true: a brownstone floor-through, white and full of paintings (Naturally), “with a good library and record collection.” John had procured a huge steak, and as I helped him set the table The doorbell rang and Frank O’Hara, fresh from the museum And svelte in a hound’s tooth sports coat entered, followed shortly By “excitement-prone Kenneth Koch” in somber gray, And I was one with my immortals. In the small mythologies We make up out of memories and the flow of time A few moments remain frozen, though the feel of them is lost, The feel of talk. It ranged from puns to gossip, always coming back To poems and poets. Frank was fiercely loyal to young poets (Joe Ceravolo’s name came up I think), and when I mentioned Lewis In a way that must have sounded catty, he leapt to his defense, Leaving me to backtrack in embarrassment and have another drink, Which is what everyone had. I think you see where it was going: Conversation drifting into dinner, then I stayed for dinner And everyone forgot about the play, which was never finished (Though I think I’ve seen a fragment of it somewhere). I see a table In a cone of light, but there’s no sound except for Kenneth’s Deadpan “Love to see a boy eat” as I speared a piece of steak; And then the only voice I’m sure I hear is mine, As those moments that had once seemed singular and clear Dissolve into a “general mess of imprecision of feeling” And images, augmented by line breaks. There were phone calls, Other people arrived, the narrative of the night dissolved And finally everyone went home. School and spring wound down. The semester ended, then the weekend that I wrote about in “Sally’s Hair” Arrived and went, and then a late-night cruise around Manhattan for a rich friend’s Parents’ anniversary bash, followed by an Upper East Side preppie bar That left me looking for a place to crash, and so I rang John’s bell at 2 AM And failed (thank God) to rouse him, caught a plane to San Diego The next day, worked at my summer job and worked on poems And started reading Proust, and got a card one afternoon From Peter Schjeldahl telling me that Frank O’Hara had been killed. Ninety-fifth Street soldiered on for several years. I remember a cocktail party (the symposium of those days), Followed by dinner just around the corner at Elaine’s, Pre-Woody Allen. It was there I learned of R.F.K.’s assassination When I woke up on the daybed in the living room, and where John told me getting married would ruin me as a poet (I don’t know why—most of his friends were married), a judgment He revised when he met Susan and inscribed The Double Dream of Spring “If this is all we need fear from spinach, then I don’t mind so much” (Which was probably premature—watering his plants one day She soaked his landlord, Giorgio Cavallon, dozing in the garden below). It was where Peter Delacorte late one night recited an entire side Of a Firesign Theatre album from memory, and set John on that path, To his friends’ subsequent dismay, and where he blessed me with his extra copy Of The Poems , and next day had second thoughts (though I kept it anyway). Sometimes a vague, amorphous stretch of years assumes a shape, And then becomes an age, and then a golden age alive with possibilities, When change was in the air and you could wander through its streets As though through Florence and the Renaissance. I know it sounds ridiculous, But that’s the way life flows: in stages that take form in retrospect, When all the momentary things that occupy the mind from day to day Have vanished into time, and something takes their place that wasn’t there, A sense of freedom—one which gradually slipped away. The center Of the conversation moved downtown, the Renaissance gave way to mannerism As the junior faculty took charge, leaving the emeriti alone and out of it Of course, lying on the fringes, happily awake; but for the rest The laws proscribing what you couldn’t do were clear. I got so tired Of writing all those New York poems (though by then I’d moved to Boston— To Siena, you might say) that led to nowhere but the next one, So I started writing poems about whatever moved me: what it’s like To be alive within a world that holds no place for you, yet seems so beautiful; The feeling of the future, and its disappointments; the trajectory of a life, That always brought me back to time and memory (I’d finished Proust by then), And brings me back to this. John finally moved downtown himself, Into a two-story apartment at Twenty-fifth and Tenth, with a spiral staircase Leading to a library, the locus of the incident of Susan, Alydar and John And the pitcher of water (I’ll draw a veil over it), and Jimmy Schuyler sighing “It’s so beautiful ,” as Bernadette Peters sang “Raining in My Heart” from Dames at Sea . The poetry still continued—mine and everyone’s. I’d added Jimmy To my pantheon (as you’ve probably noticed), but the night in nineteen sixty-six Seemed more and more remote: I never saw Kenneth anymore, And there were new epicenters, with new casts of characters, like Madoo, Bob Dash’s garden in Sagaponack, and Bill and Willy’s loft in Soho. John moved again, to Twenty-second Street, and Susan and I moved to Milwaukee, Where our son was born. I stopped coming to New York, and writing poems, For several years, while I tried to dream enough philosophy for tenure. One afternoon in May I found myself at Ninth and Twenty-second, And as though on cue two people whom I hadn’t seen in years—David Kalstone, Darragh Park—just happened by, and then I took a taxi down to Soho To the loft, and then a gallery to hear Joe Brainard read from I Remember , Back to John’s and out to dinner—as though I’d never been away, Though it was all too clear I had. Poems were in the air, but theory too, And members of the thought police department (who must have also gotten tenure) Turned up everywhere, with arguments that poetry was called upon to prove. It mattered, but in a different way, as though it floated free from poems And wasn’t quite the point. I kept on coming back, as I still do. Half my life was still to come, and yet the rest was mostly personal: I got divorced, and Willy killed himself, and here I am now, ready to retire. There was an obituary in the Times last week for Michael Goldberg, A painter you’ll recall from Frank O’Hara’s poems (“Why I Am Not a Painter,” “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)”). I didn’t know him, But a few months after the soiree on Ninety-fifth Street I was at a party In his studio on the Bowery, which was still his studio when he died. The New York art world demimonde was there, including nearly everyone Who’s turned up in this poem. I remember staring at a guy who Looked like something from the Black Lagoon, dancing with a gorgeous Woman half his age. That’s my New York: an island dream Of personalities and evenings, nights where poetry was second nature And their lives flowed through it and around it as it gave them life. O brave new world (now old) that had such people in’t! *     *     * “The tiresome old man is telling us his life story.” I guess I am, but that’s what poets do—not always Quite as obviously as this, and usually more by indirection And omission, but beneath the poetry lies the singular reality And unreality of an individual life. I see it as a long, Illuminated tunnel, lined with windows giving on the scenes outside— On Ninety-fifth Street forty years ago. As life goes on You start to get increasingly distracted by your own reflection And the darkness gradually becoming visible at the end. I try not to look too far ahead, but just to stay here— Quick now, here, now, always —only something pulls me Back (as they say) to the day, when poems were more like secrets, With their own vernacular, and you could tell your friends By who and what they read. And now John’s practically become A national treasure, and whenever I look up I think I see him Floating in the sky like the Cheshire Cat. I don’t know What to make of it, but it makes me happy—like seeing Kenneth Just before he died (“I’m going west John, I’m going west”) In his apartment on a side street near Columbia, or remembering Once again that warm spring night in nineteen sixty-six. I like to think of them together once again, at the cocktail party At the end of the mind, where I could blunder in and ruin it one last time. Meanwhile, on a hillside in the driftless region to the west, A few miles from the small town where The Straight Story ends, I’m building a house on a meadow, if I’m permitted to return, Behind a screen of trees above a lower meadow, with some apple trees In which the fog collects on autumn afternoons, and a vista Of an upland pasture without heaviness. I see myself Sitting on the deck and sipping a martini, as I used to at Larre’s, In a future that feels almost like a past I’m positive is there— But where? I think my life is still all conversation, Only now it’s with myself. I can see it continuing forever, Even in my absence, as I close the windows and turn off the lights And it begins to rain. And then we’re there together In the house on the meadow, waiting for whatever’s left to come In what’s become the near future—two versions of myself And of the people that we knew, each one an other To the other, yet both indelibly there: the twit of twenty And the aging child of sixty-two, still separate And searching in the night, listening through the night To the noise of the rain and memories of rain And evenings when we’d wander out into the Renaissance, When I could see you and talk to you and it could still change ; And still there in the morning when the rain has stopped, And the apples are all getting tinted in the cool light.

(For Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917—2001) maybe there is something about the seventh of June: Gwen, Prince and me . . . or maybe people just have to be born at some time . . . and there are only three hundred sixty-five days or three sixty-six every four years or so . . . meaning that some things happen at the same time in the same rising sign . . . and the same houses in Gemini . . . but some of us might also consider the possibility of reincarnating revolving restructuring that spirit . . . reshaping that spirit . . . releasing that spirit . . . tucking the use- less inside and when the useless pushes out again we restructure again and poetry and song and praisesong go on  . . . because it is the right thing to do we always will cry when a great heart . . . a good soul . . . one of the premier poets of her age restructures . . . reincarnates  . . . revolves into a resolve that we now carry in our hearts . . . as all great women and men are alive . . . not by biology but remem- brance . . . and that’s all right . . . as the old folk say . . . because as long as they stay on the lips . . . they nestle in our hearts and those souls which are planted . . . continue growing . . . until generations not knowing their touch . . . their voice . . . or even the fact that some Chicago poets are terrible cooks . . . but always fun to eat with . . . will tell tales of having met someone who knew someone who once watched a basketball game . . . in which some Chicago poet cheered for Seattle at the request of some Virginia poet who wanted more games . . . while Mr. Blakely was amazed that a Chicago poet was even watching a game . . . and didn’t we miss him as he slipped away watching baseball . . . and what a way to go . . . though we then did sort of know . . . that once gone . . . he would call the woman he loved and so we come to no more phone calls at six a.m. to chat ... and no more Benihana when we are all in New York . . . and no more gossiping and questioning and trying to make sense of a senseless world . . . no more face-to-face . . . only the poetry which is a great monument from this Topeka daughter to the world . . . and yet . . . there can be no complaints in this passing . . . no sorrow songs . . . no if onlys . . . it is all here: the work the love: the woman: who gave and gave and gave . . . no complaints of too long or too hard . . . no injustice of accident or misunderstanding of disease . . . just one great woman moving to the next phase . . . and us on the ground . . . giving Alleluias

It was twilight all day. Sometimes the smallest things weigh us down, small stones that we can't help admiring and palming. Look at the tiny way this lighter vein got inside. Look at the heavy gray dome of its sky. This is no immutable world. We know less than its atoms, rushing through. Light, light. Light as air, to them, for all we know. Trust me on this one, there is happiness at stake. Boulder, grain. Planet, dust: What fills the stones fills us. I remember, or I have a feeling, I could be living somewhere with you, weighted down the way we aren't now. Often the greatest things, those you'd think would be the heaviest, are the very ones that float.

I am a woman. No more and no less I live my life as it is thread by thread and I spin my wool to wear, not to complete Homer’s story, or his sun. And I see what I see as it is, in its shape, though I stare every once in a while in its shade to sense the pulse of defeat, and I write tomorrow on yesterday’s sheets: there’s no sound other than echo. I love the necessary vagueness in what a night traveler says to the absence of birds over the slopes of speech and above the roofs of villages I am a woman, no more and no less The almond blossom sends me flying in March, from my balcony, in longing for what the faraway says: “Touch me and I’ll bring my horses to the water springs.” I cry for no clear reason, and I love you as you are, not as a strut nor in vain and from my shoulders a morning rises onto you and falls into you, when I embrace you, a night. But I am neither one nor the other no, I am not a sun or a moon I am a woman, no more and no less So be the Qyss of longing, if you wish. As for me I like to be loved as I am not as a color photo in the paper, or as an idea composed in a poem amid the stags … I hear Laila’s faraway scream from the bedroom: Do not leave me a prisoner of rhyme in the tribal nights do not leave me to them as news … I am a woman, no more and no less I am who I am, as you are who you are: you live in me and I live in you, to and for you I love the necessary clarity of our mutual puzzle I am yours when I overflow the night but I am not a land or a journey I am a woman, no more and no less And I tire from the moon’s feminine cycle and my guitar falls ill string by string I am a woman, no more and no less!