872 Life poems

Not having as yet learned how to live— indecision skittering like a dust devil across appetite’s parking lot—the time has come to learn how to die. First I’ll put away my clothes, return my books to their shelves; then I’ll raise the blinds, to see what’s happening on the street and which birds are forming their flocks, since I think it will be fall with the trees nearly bare, except for clusters of leaves clinging to the oaks. Does it matter that I’ve never learned to sleep on my back? Soon I’ll have plenty of time to practice. Like people standing in line waiting for a train, I’ll check my watch against a clock on the wall, touch the ticket tucked in my breast pocket. Don’t accuse me of morbidity. Actuarial tables have quickened their work against me. Oh, it’s no simple thing to practice for death and I’ve yet to reach the subject of goodbyes. Will I have time to speak to the people I love, to press hand or stroke a cheek? Then each might need to make some remark, maybe even an ironic gesture, nothing too somber as could complicate a rational occasion. Better, I think, to slip out across the driveway to where a car is waiting, its motor making the softest hum. As often occurs the cat will escort me part way and I’ll bend to scratch his ears, as he stretches to let me scratch his neck as well. I don’t know what birds will be left, I don’t know if it will be sunny or dark. Pausing, I’ll pat my pockets to see if I’ve got my keys, and then smile at my mistake. No time now for whatever remains undone, no time for regrets or good thoughts, not time perhaps— and this is hard to imagine—even to shut my eyes. Yes, this practicing for death is no simple thing— look at how I open my hand and once or twice flick my wrist so a bit of fluff or loose thread stuck to my fingers can at last float away.

The young bull dropped his head and stared. Only a wispy wire—electrified—kept us apart. That, and two long rows of asparagus. An ancient apple tree blossomed prodigally pink and white. The muddy path sucked at my shoe, but I reached the granite step, and knocked at the rickety porch door. Deep in the house a dog began to bark. I had prepared my Heart Fund speech, and the first word—When—was on my tongue. I heard no steps—only the breeze riffling the tender poplar leaves, and a random, meditative moo behind me. . . . Relieved, I turned back to the car, passing once more under the bull’s judicial eye. . . . Everything was intact: the canister, still far too light and mute, and metal boutonnières where they began— in a zip-lock plastic sandwich bag.

Dear Kit, I’m sad we never did that Yacht Rock Karaoke Contest, or was it just Michael McDonald? But some things need not have happened to have floated as bright boats of genius upon the dark waters of this world. No things but in ideas. In fact, no things at all. Just ideas without the mess of facts, actions, actuality... actually Why don’t we... [wait for it] “... steal away” you sing in your captain’s hat on the deck of the S.S. Pangea — that perfect falsetto thought yacht on which we’ll sail this sea of mental illness in between us till we drown.

In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents are buried side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite. Then, all day, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

That this mountainside looks like a face is accidental, which is a shame, for I dearly love to laugh. The touch-smoothed redwood cross-section, in its rings of growth and brightness, seems like a sun seen from underwater, wobbly as jelly, mocking my inability to find a job, my food stamps, and saddens me to see the teens tagging themselves in nearby places to earn a virtual friend's respect, or boasting other symptoms of youth while leaving their greasy fingerprints on the thick lenses of my glasses, mocking my desire for artwork to remain packed in straw, and in music for sleepers halfway awake to grow wild in. It all gives me faith in arranging, I guess, when there is nothing else I seem much good at but fuss and copy and paste, with a head full of so many other worries. Got a check today. Bought a book I can't read without it putting me to sleep with its out-of-date luxuriousness. So instead of reading it, I stayed up and listened to Harry Partch's song And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, dedicating it to the memory of Ramon Novarro, hoping it would arch electrically above him with all the characteristics of fire all night, all day, and soak his early spring colors in a late autumn sun as pale as silver and fern-green skies to draw light through midnight

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?

No, worry about nothing but the chiseling of hills into distance in the slight haze and sleep lost over color no two ever the same the wringing hands float ashore amazed. Worry about beauty. It can sell you anything. Lakes collect in the chambers of the heart where the sailboats are made of flying fish about the size of match heads. Sleep can be lost as easily as a house key, the shock can consume at any moment if the hills are not rising weather is wearing them down and you are driving north in the late afternoon or holding your eyes in your hands like addresses.

I left you last evening without the usual privileges. A lot of what my body was was toxin, that held me aloft in idle price, far from the witless wood and Arcadia. There’s no more moon for birds to buss at over streetlamps. Urchins make their way in the mist, trolling for dinner rolls. How frugal my recent times were spent, the clocks keeping how stoned a content. There’ll be much better dawns than this forthcoming. Now—silver morning, body trussed across a sphere—what would Salome do?A certain Grace is coming toward you and xe is lovely. The troposphere might solder the iron we sought here, the sky is neither an abaude. What Portia lacks is not anatomical, but philosophical: ‘bitter is my sustenance, melancholy my food, sorry my wine.’ Expressive geometrics of the New York sissy—and with such a disfunctional phone! Portia tells her students get thee to a muhfuckery, where I’ll lay thee fool across my lap. P meets Sally’s longings, her shoes untied, and everything about her demonstrating a careless desolation, a blue eye and sunken.Take one step further and the Grace coming toward you is Beauty. The Grace turned away from you is Restraint. Hassan pleading for her life, fainting, having a bucket of water thrown on her, reviving. Nothing but a farce, we animate Wall and Moon. The art is cruxy to the love-juice. Once there was many a sight, but now they are wilting, poor lambs. Once a malapert downpour, uncharacteristic of the rains of this place. Next football, a hemistich. The belle lettrist’s idea of a billet-doux, the scientist’s idea of a sauna. What with their consummate barbeque wines, their tawdry dance moves, their go-go girls of yesteryear—we thought the Impressionists were trying to impress people. Fez—an impossibility the universe grew out of. Flaubert saying, Madame Bovary, c’est moi. Loeretta casting her lots.

We had to imagine you even then, Ramon, your star lost, a glimpse to die for, all the kids galloping to Westside Park where your gang was supposed to meet in open warfare those bitter skinny boys from Toonerville, well-armed, Lupe said. And when we got there, nothing, no armies, no chucos with long tails and zip guns, just the grass with its stunned look, as though it never really wanted all that light. City grass doesn't want much of anything, it's not out there trembling with desire, minds its own business, leeching slowly upward from busted pipe. And now nobody knows what you really wanted, Ramon, when the needle spun true north, or why that final rush of light, flat stare of lawn as you staggered by, seared your own throat shut. Tonight, I'm getting to the smallest place I know, dusk coming on slow, the moon half full of shade, so still it almost doesn't want to move, whispers a phrase to particles of blue. Same moon you knew with its white mind watching, same moon you walked beneath and were gone.

There  is a  sorceress in our night.  A  sky  that  only  moves  memory to make place  for  the  mangoes of last month.  There is an old man who says,Libéremoi.  And  means,  Take  everything   but  my  blackness.  Only  in the dark do doves  find   reason.  Only  in  the  dark  do  doves  have  reason to believe that vengeance  is  light  hanging  on  fallen  tree.  After each  fall, we  ask, where is the   island,   the  sugarcane  that  disappeared  in  our hunger,  the  water that emptied  our  thirst,  the  song   that  robbed  our  nightmare?   They  mock  us. They  tell  us to  whisper in their ears.  They will obey.  But  curses  beat  the air wild.  The air is faint.  And they tell us,Stop plotting fire. You are in the wrongland even if the roosters recognize you. They hated our black. What they didn't understand is that it illuminates their world.