872 Life poems

It’s midnight in a drizzling fog on Sunset Avenue and we are walking through the scent of orange blossoms and past a white camellia blown down or flung by someone onto rainblack asphalt waiting for the gray Mercedes sedan to run over and smash its petals and leave us walking in the smell of Diesel exhaust with orange-blossom bouquet. Where the next blue morning and the gray Pacific meet as the Palisades fall away two sparrowhawks are beating their tapered wings in place, watching for jay or chewink to stray too far from their thorny scrub to get back— and the female suddenly towers, her wings half-close and she stoops like a dropping dagger, but down the steep slope she rockets past them and turns again into updraft to the clifftops to hover— as the jay peers out through thorns, and the lines of white surf whisper in.

Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer Northampton-style, on the porch out back. Its voice touches and parts the air of summer, as if  it swam to time us down a river where we dive and leave a single track as evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer that lets us wash our mix of dreams together. Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act; its voice touches and parts the air of summer. When we disentangle you are not with her I am not with him. Redress calls for tact. Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer still. A small breeze rises and the leaves stir as uneasy as we, while the woods go black; its voice touches and parts the air of summer and lets darkness enter us; our strings go slack though the player keeps up his plangent attack. Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer; its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The bar in the commuter station The Title: "The Northeast Corridor" In his book The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye(2007), Revell called it “a title taken from newspeak and describing that cindery ganglion of railways between Boston to the north and D.C. to the southern end.” The term is used today by Amtrak. steams like a ruin, its fourth wall open to the crowd and the fluttering timetables. In the farthest corner, the television crackles a torch song torch song A sad or sentimental love song and a beaded gown. She is my favorite singer, dead when I was born. And I have been waiting for hours for a train, exhausted between connections to small cities, awake only in my eyes finding shelter in the fluttering ribbon of shadow around the dead woman singing on the screen. Exhaustion is a last line of defense where time either stops dead or kills you. It teaches you to see what your eyes see without questions, without the politics of living in one city, dying in another. How badly I would like to sleep now in the shadows beside real things or beside things that were real once, like the beaded gown on the television, like the debut of a song in New York in black and white when my parents were there. I feel sometimes my life was used up before I was born. My eyes sear sear To burn, to whither, or to dry up backwards into my head to the makeshift of what I have already seen or heard described or dreamed about, too weary not to envy the world its useless outlines. Books of photographs of New York in the forties. The dark rhombus rhombus A four-sided shape, like a parallelogram. The window is shaped like a diamond on its side. See Wikipedia . of a window of a train rushing past my train. The dark halo around the body of a woman I love from something much farther than a distance. The world is insatiable. It takes your legs off It takes your legs off Donald Revell wrote in his book The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye(2007), “One of my favorite euphemisms is ‘legless,’ meaning drunk” , it takes your arms and parades in front of you such wonderful things, such pictures of warm houses trellised trellised An architectural term, meaning enclosed or supported. In many cases, a trellis is a kind of open latticework on which vines can grow. along the sides with green so deep it is like black air, only transparent, of women singing, of trains of lithium trains of lithium Lithium (lithium carbonate) has been used as a psychiatric medication to treat bipolar disorder and manic depression. A play on “train of thought”; as the third lightest element, “lithium” may be used to describe a lightness or airiness, complementing “transparent.” on the awakening body of a landscape or across the backdrop of an old city steaming and high-shouldered as the nineteen-forties. The world exhausts exhausts Used here in both senses: to tire and to expel exhaust everything except my eyes because it is a long walk to the world begun before I was born. In the far corner the dead woman bows off stage. The television crumples into a white dot crumples into a white dot Older tube televisions, when turned off, would have its picture quickly dissolve into a small white dot in the center of the screen as the last train of the evening, my train, is announced. I lived in one place. I want to die in another.

Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective may see Foot 1957, also Wetermarck 1906, Ch. XIII To man (sic) the world is twofold, in accordance with that witness is now or in the future It wasn't until the waitress brought her Benedictine and she Villandry, "Les Douves" par Azay le Rideau mine. Yours, CYNTHIA. Not a building, this earth, not a cage, The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless a forgery: Opus loannes Bellini We named you I thought the earth is possible I could not tell to make live and conscious history in common and wake you find yourself among and wake up deep in the fruit Did you get the money we sent? I smell fire AT FULL VOLUME. STAGE DARK] 1. Russia, 1927 God, say your prayers. You were begotten in a vague war sidelong into your brain. In Letter Three & Four (as earlier) the narrator is North Dakota Portugal Moorhead, Minnesota The lights go down, the curtain opens: the first thing we gun, Veronica wrote, the end. 'Wittgenstein' Tomorrow she would be in America. Over forty years ago a tense, cunningly moving tale by the Hunga- Then he moved on and I went close behind. Interviewers: What drew a woman from Ohio to study in Tübingen? American Readers with this issue former subscribers to Marxist Perspectives The shadow of the coup continues to hover over Spain In the ordinary way of summer girls were still singing like a saguaro cactus from which any desert wayfarer can draw as is Mr. Fox, but in literature Twenty five years have gone by Ya se dijeron las cosas mas oscuras The most obscure things have already been said

Half of the Beatles have fallen and half are yet to fall. Keith Moon has set. Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet. Children sing for Alex Chilton. Whitney Houston’s left the Hilton. Hendrix, Guru, Bonham, Janis. They have a tendency to vanish. Bolan, Bell, and Boon by car. How I wonder where they are. Hell is now Jeff Hanneman’s. Adam Yauch and three Ramones. [This space held in reserve for Zimmerman and Osterberg, for Bruce and Neil and Keith, that sere and yellow leaf.] Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, Stinson, Sterling, Otis Redding. Johnny Thunders and Joe Strummer, Ronnie Dio, Donna Summer. Randy Rhoads and Kurt Cobain, Patsy Cline and Ronnie Lane. Poly Styrene, Teena Marie. Timor mortis conturbat me.

Not for that city of the level sun, Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze— The shadeless, sleepless city of white days, White nights, or nights and days that are as one— We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done. We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see What, from the threshold of eternity We shall step into. No, I think we shun The splendour of that everlasting glare, The clamour of that never-ending song. And if for anything we greatly long, It is for some remote and quiet stair Which winds to silence and a space for sleep Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.

Searching for pillowcases trimmed with lace that my mother-in-law once made, I open the chest of drawers upstairs to find that mice have chewed the blue and white linen dishtowels to make their nest, and bedded themselves among embroidered dresser scarves and fingertip towels. Tufts of fibers, droppings like black caraway seeds, and the stains of birth and afterbirth give off the strong unforgettable attar of mouse that permeates an old farmhouse on humid summer days. A couple of hickory nuts roll around as I lift out the linens, while a hail of black sunflower shells falls on the pillowcases, yellow with age, but intact. I’ll bleach them and hang them in the sun to dry. There’s almost no one left who knows how to crochet lace.... The bright-eyed squatters are not here. They’ve scuttled out to the fields for summer, as they scuttled in for winter—along the wall, from chair to skirted chair, making themselves flat and scarce while the cat dozed with her paws in the air, and we read the mail or evening paper, unaware.

She holds a conversation with her ornaments, stray or contingent, heaped in patches darkly and then loosened onto the table to be consumed. Collect me, they seem to ask, into an assembly; construe us like any morning onto any day. Bring us forward notch by notch into a paradigm of comfort to be clasped: any cup will do. Any dance? Take a seed and blow it toward the curtain which, like a bright shield hugging breasts into radiance, is seen and spoken of and desired. Will any silence fit? So many columns of air are held upright in inebriated passage, so many paper stacks brittle under the weight of what was news to attentive readers as zones of holy strangers feed through tunnels their imported cares. Stare at us, they seem to say, we are windows propped up against the sky, quotations of light waiting to sail into your aperture, calling because because and now now now. And the good body is pulled over the original rapacious body like a huge sock, its cornucopia of sour wind and dust emptied into the firmament.

Self-interest cropped up even there, the day I hoisted three instead of the two called-for spades of loam onto the coffin of my friend. Why shovel more than anybody else? What did I think I'd prove? More love (mud in her eye)? More will to work (her father what, a shirker?) Christ, I'd give an arm or leg to get that spoonful back. She cannot die again; and I do nothing but relive.

(Jamestown 1957) It kissed us, soft, to cut our throats, this coast, like a malice of the lazy King. I hunt, & hunt! but find here what to kill?—nothing is blunt, but phantoming uneases I find. Ghost on ghost precedes of all most scared us, most we fled. Howls fail upon this secret, far air: grunt, shaming for food; you must. I love the King & it was not I who strangled at the toast but a flux of a free & dying adjutant: God be with him. He & God be with us all, for we are not to live, I cannot wring, like laundry, blue my soul—indecisive thing . . From undergrowth & over odd birds call and who would starv'd so survive? God save the King.