873 Life poems

A Montparnasse August with view of the Cimetière. A yard of bones. We wake to it. Close curtains to it. Wake to its lanes. Rows of coffin-stones in varying light. Walking here. Late with shade low, low, long. We’re passing through, just passing through neat aisles of gray mausoleums. (From Paris. Send this postcard. This one. Calm water lilies. Water lilies. Nothing colorless.) It’s morning. Baudelaire’s tomb. Tree limbs casting shadow west. This, a lot of time under a looming sky. Nobody has time like this. (Time to go to Le Mandarin for coffee every day. We’re not complaining. They bring the milk separate. Watch the passersby on Saint-Germain.) Nothing to ponder. This is the plight. Pause by Pigeon in bed with his wife — both fully dressed. Pink flowers, pink flowers, just beneath de Beauvoir’s name. When she lived she lived two doors down. Went south in August. All of us smell of heat all the time. We are the living. Oh dear! There are the dead ones there. Their thoughts more familiar, though. Lives finished, nearly clear. And they make it possible for us to go on living as we do in their blue shade.

The word penis is probably the most misattributed word in English, I think. Because almost nobody has a real one. The standards are made in Japanese or German factories. Womb/vagina sets are unusual too if genuine. Standards are from China; they are recycled sheepskin wallets. I was shocked too when I heard this. I do not have an actual either but they called me a genius when I figured it out about the fetal lamb/sheep skin. What else to do with all the wallets now that there’s no money? Only barter. I do not know what the inside of this thing looks like but I think it looks like a brain made of mozzarella cheese. Standard penises are made of a certain kind of plant. An ocean weed and how it’s fitted is by body weight at birth which is why you shouldn’t smoke if you are pregnant, you will be blamed even though it’s complicated to know exact reasons as we all in the new world know better each day. They’ve made new lingo to go with the genuine penis. They say unicorn, I say wasabi. Apparently, almost everyone gets green horseradish with sushi. Wasabi takes several million years to grow, its taste is delicate. When I mentioned Japan earlier, I meant the motor city. When I say Wasabi near Japan; it’s island of slow unit dance or Remarkable Mask. When I say new world, it’s where the newly suited go. T-cell robots, we of lambs and plants and jellyfish that are in our eyes which are colored by their place in the ocean. Really, if you broke us down, you’d have quite a collection: resins from pine, precious stones, silver dust, and sea grass filaments, stalks, pig livers, skin, a milk protein. This is the equipment for the dominant standard penis holders of the unreal, and I would love to be one with a genuine but I have not the stomach to pull off the cunning necessary for the genuine purse/penis license. You barter for it; you lie. Don’t get me wrong, it must be nice to have options. But to get them dishonestly? It’s bothering. I know, I know! I have got to say goodbye to the babyhood phase. Learn to thrive! Nobody has a father or a mother. I know this means to thrive! To be one’s own lover. My sheepskin wallet is . . . What could a person say? Stuck in the past, tripped up by the concept of wallet? It’s not like anything gets taken out unless it’s rotten which it probably isn’t because I feel okay and you look alright. It’s that it wants to be ultimate although a new and genuine vagina/womb set from a biped has not been recorded in over 180 years which means billions of here/now moments. Which means forgotten a trillion times and remembered exactly one plus that. There’s not as much empty space as we thought in the old blueprints that made donuts in space—the halo, the Homeric lure. The one electron penis and the drone. I’ve been sick and found all this out because I couldn’t get out of bed and there was a diamond near my head. I was reading about moray eels, their hydraulics. How they practically fly-fish with agility. It’s the forward going. I’d like to go boldly. I’ve kept a card of energy. Wilderness saved from childhood. Of this secret, one must be silent so the sun can trust us. Kids need each other. Better they never get separated entirely. Contra this, I do want to fly fish. To cast off and plant it then go with the nylon line. Where to take off the old wallet and give it back to a lamb. I’ll be the promo homo making arrangements to go to the show where we trade our new pieces congenially and find others, depleted by scavengers, and get them up-and-running to better suns, not the promised land, exactly the opposite. Exactly the opposite of anything promised.

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.