872 Life poems

Dog bone, stapler, cribbage board, garlic press because this window is loose—lacks suction, lacks grip. Bungee cord, bootstrap, dog leash, leather belt because this window had sash cords. They frayed. They broke. Feather duster, thatch of straw, empty bottle of Elmer's glue because this window is loud—its hinges clack open, clack shut. Stuffed bear, baby blanket, single crib newel because this window is split. It's dividing in two. Velvet moss, sagebrush, willow branch, robin's wing because this window, it's pane-less. It's only a frame of air.

Edwin Hubble “Tall, strong, beautiful, with the shoulders of Hermes of Praxiteles, that is how my wife first fashioned me, I who proved our Milky Way but another galaxy among the Nebelflecken fleeing breakneck with the rest by the law, the constant, the time that bear my name: Hubble, stamped with Newton, Copernicus, Galileo. Not bad for an Ozark farm boy hodded off to Oxford on a Rhodes, who tailored himself to tweeds and speaks the King’s English, as though he’d suckled on shires. Astronomy, I attest, is a history of receding horizons, though mine tend to open to dinners with Stravinsky, the Fairbanks, and coup de maître, my surprise star-turn at the Oscars: spotlights, applause, the whole heavens blue-shifted to me. Still—nothing headier than nights on Mt. Wilson, eye at the lens, my briar pipe glowing, Humason at the spectrascope tracing the light shifts who was my mule driver. His habits—straight poker, panther juice—try the soul, but he’s brilliant at the shot. Odd, too, the little priest who came to visit years ago, that he should account for nebulas’ radial velocities two years before me, though I only trust the data— how he looked calmly pleased at Einstein’s recantation: The most beautiful solution to creation I have ever heard. So clocks reel back with space—camera, action, light.”

Not seeing me, not even looking, K. on her silver cruiser charms her way through the last long moment of   the changing light: snow boots and a Seychelles Warbler’s old blue tights, a rolled-up yoga mat in her basket wobbling like a wild tiller as she pedals. It feels illicit and somewhat right to stand across the intersection without shouting her name, or even waving. According to the internet tutorial, the fact that photons turn into tiny loyal billiard balls as soon as we start watching suggests no error of method or measurement, but rather, as far as anyone can tell, an invisibly unstable world, a shaking everywhere that seeing must pin down and fix. So, that morning I stumbled on you out, alone, bending through the traffic at Orange and Edwards Streets: a someone else then whom I, alone, can never otherwise see — there has to be a kind of   speech beyond naming, or even praise, a discipline that locates light and lets it go.

Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem written about something important or special that's gonna happen or already did. Think of a specific occasion, she says — and write about it. Like what?! Lamont asks. He's all slouched down in his seat. I don't feel like writing about no occasion. How about your birthday?

Ice glitters like it’s good. The whole world glitters, sped towards ends, we all fall in. Under the ice is water. But under the world, between you and the everything of your vanishing . . .

A car is idling on the cliff. Its top is down. Its headlights throw A faint, bright ghost-shadow glow On the pale air. On the shore, so far Below that the waves' push and drag Is dwindled to a hush—a kind Of oceanic idle—the sea Among the boulders plays a blind- Fold game of hide and seek, Or capture the flag. The flag Swells and sways. The car Is empty. A Friday, the first week Of June. Nineteen fifty-three. A car's idling on the cliff, But surely it won't be long before Somebody stops to investigate And things begin to happen fast: Men, troops of men will come, Arrive with blazing lights, a blast Of sirens, followed by still more Men. Though not a soul's in sight, The peace of the end of the late Afternoon—the sun down, but enough light Even so to bathe the heavens from Horizon to shore in a deep And delicate blue—will not keep. Confronted with such an overload Of questions (most beginning,Why would she... So gifted, bright, and only twenty-three), Attention will come to fix upon This odd last thing she did: leaving The car running, the headlights on. She stopped—it will transpire—to fill The tank a mere two miles down the road. (Just sixteen, the kid at the station will Quote her as saying, "What a pity You have to work today! It's not right... What weather! Goodness, what a night It'll be!" He'll add: "She sure was pretty.") Was there a change of plan? Why the stop for gas? Possibly She'd not yet made up her mind? Or Had made it up but not yet settled On a place? Or could it be she knew Where she was headed, what she would do— And wanted to make sure the car ran For hours afterward? Might the car not be, Then, a sort of beacon, a lighthouse- In-reverse, meant to direct one not Away from but toward the shore And its broken boulders, there to spot The bobbing white flag of a blouse? Her brief note, which will appear In the local Leader, contains a phrase ("She chanted snatches of old lands") That will muddle the town for three days, Until a Professor E. H. Wade Pins it to Ophelia—and reprimands The police, who, this but goes to show, Have not the barest knowledge of Shakespeare, Else would never have misread "lauds" As "lands." A Detective Gregg Messing Will answer, tersely, "Afraid It's not our bailiwick. Missing Persons, yes; missing poems, no." (What's truly tragic's never allowed To stand alone for long, of course. At each moment there's a crowd Of clowns pressing in: the booming ass At every wake who, angling a loud Necktie in the chip dip, Airs his problems with intestinal gas, Or the blow-dried bonehead out to sell Siding to the grieving mother . . . . Well, Wade sent the Leader another briefword: "Decades of service to the Bard now force Me to amend the girl's little slip. 'Chaunted' not 'chanted' is the preferred . . .") Yet none of her unshakeable entourage —Pedants, pundits, cops without a clue, And a yearning young grease-monkey—are Alerted yet. Still the empty car Idles, idles on the cliff, and night Isn't falling so much as day Is floating out to sea . . . . Soon, whether She's found or not, her lights will draw Moths and tiny dark-winged things that might Be dirt-clumps, ashes. Come what may, The night will be lovely, as she foresaw, The first stars easing through the blue, Engine and ocean breathing together.

Sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S. C., 1866 Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause!— Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. In seeds of laurels in the earth, The garlands of your fame are sown; And, somewhere, waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone. Meanwhile, your sisters for the years Which hold in trust your storied tombs, Bring all they now can give you—tears, And these memorial blooms. Small tributes, but your shades will smile As proudly on these wreaths to-day, As when some cannon-moulded pile Shall overlook this Bay. Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground, Than where defeated valor lies By mourning beauty crowned.

How glorious is this strange muscle in my mouth. Child’s tease, lips’ balm, baton of speech unless it’s tied. What’s forgotten is on the tip. Sides slip out the truth. The root is how far a kiss can go. One can lose it when guilty. Be lashed by another’s. Feel it twisting over rooky woods and wordless hear it swinging in a bell, sliding through a groove or placed firmly in a cheek. Beware it should be held most often for most often a forked one has no friend.

People in the middle ages didn't think they were living Between two more important and enlightened eras; Nor did they see themselves as the players In act three of a tragedy in five acts. It was not always late winter in the middle ages. People in the middle ages were not all middle-aged Though it is enjoyable on occasion to assume that they were. The sun was as bright in the dark ages As it is now—maybe a fraction brighter, in fact. Think of the middle ages and what do you see: Gloomy cathedrals, students dressed like monks in the rain, Or a band of drunken pilgrims telling obscene jokes, Or heroes embarking for the nearest wilderness come April? Your answer will reveal yourself to yourself But you may not know it—may choose to hide In hazy visions of a serene and indescribable paradise. And paradise, as we all know, may be paradise when we’re dead, But is boredom on earth, alas. We never think of ennui in relation to the middle ages. Should we? Did Thomas Aquinas never get bored Cooking up elaborate refutations of diminutive heresies? No, and you shouldn’t either. Nor did the clerks of Oxford tire of the sin against the Holy Ghost, Trying to figure out what it was. On chill September mornings when I smoked too much the night before And I drank too much the night before And a sinister cough rises up From the depths of the belly of my being, I like to imagine living in Provence Or even in Rheims during the middle ages.

We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers And sitting by desolate streams; World losers and world forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems. With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world’s great cities. And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire’s glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song’s measure Can trample an empire down. We, in the ages lying In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself with our mirth; And o’erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world’s worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth.