872 Life poems

Some problems of self-loathing, worry: the thumbnail blotched in a bank box door grows out, three-quarter moon marrow spot filled out with white bruise travels down my thumb at regular speed, so when I glance down it's what I see left of center, not the odd breast, the malformed scruff at head, the old thought leaking pain on the pages from my brain, which ought to be gainfully occupied with rain as an emblem of loss and gain, and is not.

Out of your whole life give but one moment! All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it, – so you ignore, So you make perfect the present, – condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense – Merged in a moment which gives me at last You around me for once, you beneath me, above me – Me – sure that despite of time future, time past, – This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me! How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet – The moment eternal – just that and no more – When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!

Toggle me up on one last vanity flight half drunk on a screw-top frizzante. It takes a hell of a lot more to get me here than it did when I had beauty, boys when bedding me was the easy way to know me. Don’t tuck me in so tight. I’m not your grandma. This rough blanket its green red yellow indigo stripes I traded for a perfectly warm beaver pelt. Fly me once more over my disloyal youth and its hangdog slavering over men whom age has de-sexed right along with me. They broadcast impotent outrage from aluminum tablets. I collect speculums with Bakelite handles arranging them by size though it no longer matters.

Emptied, precious, querulous, frail, a box of butter biscuits by the bedside, dun pills in a pale plastic tray, your grandmother lies in her tiny bones and mumbles, mysterious, while you say nothing, barely thirteen, blank as the day. You were to keep an eye on her breathing, her little bones heaving, and your eyes scan figurines, mementos on the windowsill — Little Bo Peep has lost her head — and green fields through the window: hay barns, small farms, a chicken battery shed. Bwwaaakk! Buck-back-bock-buckaaaakk! Rows upon rows of chickens. There was a funnel hung from a gibbet that swung like a big steel conical conundrum above their dun feathers — the color of your grandmother’s tights scrumpled on the floor. Even a year before, she would have swooned for shame at the sight of those tights half-trailed under her bed, their crinkled wee ankles jouking out, as if they had crawled under and tipped their wrinkled cargo into the void — your grandmother in bed, waiting for the spoon. Her weak breath does not reach heaven but hazes among the chipped figurines, the dull color television’s black screen, fading flesh-colored flowers on the wall- paper, dun as the wings of those dirt-crusted rows upon rows of throbbing chickens. When you dropped one into the funnel its head pushed through that blood-rimmed O to stare chicken-eyed at the other side, blackened numbles and giblets upon which it would soon stream like warm port, its feet still in a fidget. What gets passed on, through generations? Your grandmother tries to speak. Her bony fingers clutch your hand — and you bend your head down. But you’d get more sense from the sea in a seashell as your father enters the room beaming, Well! Well?

I want no horns to rouse me up to-night, And trumpets make too clamorous a ring To fit my mood, it is so weary white I have no wish for doing any thing. A music coaxed from humming strings would please; Not plucked, but drawn in creeping cadences Across a sunset wall where some Marquise Picks a pale rose amid strange silences. Ghostly and vaporous her gown sweeps by The twilight dusking wall, I hear her feet Delaying on the gravel, and a sigh, Briefly permitted, touches the air like sleet And it is dark, I hear her feet no more. A red moon leers beyond the lily-tank. A drunken moon ogling a sycamore, Running long fingers down its shining flank. A lurching moon, as nimble as a clown, Cuddling the flowers and trees which burn like glass. Red, kissing lips, I feel you on my gown— Kiss me, red lips, and then pass—pass. Music, you are pitiless to-night. And I so old, so cold, so languorously white.

The girl was known for shitting in her yard. I did so little for her.  She was small, a dandelion orb with ragged hair like an old woman’s burnt from dye. Her face showed little sign of poverty— it was her dusty shoes cut open at the top that told. A bone look she’d mastered young, yet the curve of her face was edible, like a rounded sparrow in hand. She wasn’t mean, but did what she wanted—quietly, with a lift to her chin, while I struggled to teach her anything. I’d like to say I brushed her brittle hair, called her beautiful, coaxed out sight words that dawdled on her tongue. I dream of her spinning like a fairy dervish in my failure. Consider this a prayer, a foolish one.

My grandmother never trusted calculators. She would crunch numbers in a spiral notebook at the kitchen table, watching her news.

I like the generosity of numbers. The way, for example, they are willing to count anything or anyone: two pickles, one door to the room, eight dancers dressed as swans. I like the domesticity of addition— add two cups of milk and stir— the sense of plenty: six plums on the ground, three more falling from the tree. And multiplication’s school of fish times fish, whose silver bodies breed beneath the shadow of a boat. Even subtraction is never loss, just addition somewhere else: five sparrows take away two, the two in someone else’s garden now. There’s an amplitude to long division, as it opens Chinese take-out box by paper box, inside every folded cookie a new fortune. And I never fail to be surprised by the gift of an odd remainder, footloose at the end: forty-seven divided by eleven equals four, with three remaining. Three boys beyond their mother’s call, two Italians off to the sea, one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

What was it for the longest time but lore, lure; A heard-tell growing gold in the mind. Word said (and word’d spread) it was well on back Through the underwood by Bowen’s Canal.

Oh, what a lantern, what a lamp of light Is thy pure word to me To clear my paths and guide my goings right! I swore and swear again, I of the statues will observer be, Thou justly dost ordain. The heavy weights of grief oppress me sore: Lord, raise me by the word, As thou to me didst promise heretofore. And this unforced praise I for an off’ring bring, accept, O Lord, And show to me thy ways. What if my life lie naked in my hand, To every chance exposed! Should I forget what thou dost me command? No, no, I will not stray From thy edicts though round about enclosed With snares the wicked lay. Thy testimonies as mine heritage, I have retained still: And unto them my heart’s delight engage, My heart which still doth bend, And only bend to do what thou dost will, And do it to the end.