873 Life poems

Someone is in the kitchen washing the dishes. Someone is in the living room watching the news. Someone in a bedroom is holding a used stamp with tweezers and adding it to his collection. Someone is scolding a dog, barking now for decades, a different dog for each of the decades. Someone is reading the paper and listening to a baseball game on the radio at the same time — At the base of the altar, you drop some coins into a wooden box and the lights reveal the vast, worn painting in front of you. The holy subject is illuminated for a few minutes before it is dim again. There are churches all over Italy where you can do this. The smell of incense, stone — Someone is taking the ashes out of the small cave of the fireplace, though this might have been a hundred years ago, when the house was new and we didn’t live in it. Someone is writing a letter on thin blue paper. Someone is putting down the needle onto a spinning record, just so. On the couch, someone is sleeping. Upstairs, someone is looking into the bathroom mirror — While we were waiting for her surgery to finish, I walked around the hospital and came across a waiting room that had an enormous aquarium. The black fish with red stripes, the yellow fish with blue stripes, the triangle fish, the cylinder fish, the little orange schools and the cellophane glints of their quick turns in the box of water, among arrangements of coral, the city of bones — Someone is walking down the creaking staircase in the dark, a hand sliding on the rail. Someone is on the telephone, which means nobody else can use it for another hour. Someone in his room is doing homework, me or someone almost like me, twenty, fifty years ago. Someone is reading in her room. Someone is talking to the gray wall. Someone is talking to the gray wall. In summer, on a hot afternoon, someone peels at a corner of wallpaper and sees more wallpaper beneath — I used to think that to write poems, to make art, meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements of the self, to arrive at some essential plane, where poems were supposed to succeed. I was wrong.

1. Of the gardens of Adonis, Lydia, I love Most of all those fugitive roses That on the day they are born, That very day, must also die. Eternal, for them, the light of day: They're born when the sun is already high And die before Apollo's course Across the visible sky is run. We too, of our lives, must make one day: We never know, my Lydia, nor want To know of nights before or after The little while that we may last. 2. To be great, be whole: nothing that's you Should you exaggerate or exclude. In each thing, be all. Give all you are In the least you ever do. The whole moon, because it rides so high, Is reflected in each pool.

The ploughland has gone to bent and the pasture to heather; gin the goodwife stint, she’ll keep the house together. Gin the goodwife stint and the bairns hunger the Duke can get his rent one year longer. The Duke can get his rent and we can get our ticket twa pund emigrant on a C.P.R. packet.

Nothing substance utters or time stills and restrains joins design and supple measure deftly as thought’s intricate polyphonic score dovetails with the tread sensuous things keep in our consciousness. Celebrate man’s craft and the word spoken in shapeless night, the sharp tool paring away waste and the forms cut out of mystery! When taut string’s note passes ears’ reach or red rays or violet fade, strong over unseen forces the word ranks and enumerates... mimes clouds condensed and hewn hills and bristling forests, steadfast corn in its season and the seasons in their due array, life of man’s own body and death... The sound thins into melody, discourse narrowing, craft failing, design petering out. Ears heavy to breeze of speech and thud of the ictus.

I A Tower of Brass, one would have said, And Locks, and Bolts, and Iron Bars, Might have preserv’d one innocent Maiden-head. The jealous Father thought he well might spare All further jealous Care. And, as he walk’d, t’himself alone he smiled, To think how Venus’ Arts he had beguil’d; And when he slept, his Rest was deep: But Venus laugh’d, to see and hear him sleep: She taught the am’rous Jove A magical Receipt in Love, Which arm’d him stronger, and which help’d him more, Than all his Thunder did, and his Almightyship before. II She taught him Love’s Elixir, by which Art His Godhead into Gold he did convert; No Guards did then his Passage stay, He pass’d with Ease, Gold was the Word; Subtle as Light’ning, bright, and quick, and fierce, Gold thro’ Doors and Walls did pierce; And as that works sometimes upon the Sword, Melted the Maidenhead away, Ev’n in the secret Scabbard where it lay. The prudent Macedonian King, To blow up Towns a Golden Mine did spring; He broke thro’ Gates with this Petarr, ’Tis the great Art of Peace, the Engine ’tis of War; And Fleets and Armies follow it afar; The Ensign ’tis at Land: and ’tis the Seaman’s Star.

I was probably worst at selling weed — robbed weekly, used too much of my own product, cut each bag with a dash of oregano — but then I have to consider that summer Matty asked me to help him boost cars, his dad called me a liability — too paranoid to be lookout, too shaky to use the slim jim, didn’t even know how to drive stick — oh yeah, & let’s not forget that time Mo almost lost an arm after I convinced him to pay me twenty bucks to stitch his wound with fishing line instead of going to the hospital, or that time I convinced Aliyah to let me tattoo a cross on her ankle with a safety pin & a ballpoint — & then there’s that time I swiped a Stentor from Carl Magee’s locker & tried to set myself straight by becoming a violinist, but of course, the noise complaints, the neighbors banging the portraits off the walls, the boys talking shit, calling me prodigy,fancy chink— & I wonder if they’re still having a good laugh, like when they found out I wanted to be a poet & so they glued roses & violets to the hood of my Kia, & so maybe I wanted, for the first time, to prove them wrong, prove I didn’t belong there, & so maybe I made new friends — friends who wrote poems, who sat around talking about poems, who went to school to study poems and lived in off-campus apartments where I crashed on nights I got too fucked up on white boy drugs to drive back to the Eastside, where, even without me, the rosin glow of junkers trace the block, where Mandy, three years sober, tucks the kids into bed, where Lee, first in his class, spray-paints the fleet of stolen bikes gold, where Andrew stands in the kitchen reading the Bible in the dim light from the microwave, where Nikki, years later, coming home after a double at Champps, calls to wish me a happy birthday, & I am, of course, too busy to answer — somewhere in a different time zone, at a swanky party celebrating a man I do not know, who just won an award for a book I have not read & the woman who smells of citrus, who’s been raving to me all night about how much she admires my work, excuses herself to use the bathroom, leaving, in the seat beside me, her open purse.

Of Glory not a Beam is left But her Eternal House – The Asterisk is for the Dead, The Living, for the Stars –

Here the subject thinks “there could be flowers” or “the water was a bit disturbed when the ring fell in.” All that, painted from said things, pleases it. That explains all things except for Ovid’s exile which we will probably never understand. That adds to our sense of fragility, confirms the order in which we read. You still have the right to bear arms, “thing and joy,” the anxious doubt that was once written about. There are several versions of the story where she is transformed into a swallow, flies around a pillar. And do you find the rhyme? It originally meant spoken, the sentence, but spoken. Flight, interchangeable with fate. As for myself, I can’t begin to approach the woods with it. The words of its condition.

“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card” and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration of the Enemy Aggressor. No news medium troubled to put it in quotes. And Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself. He said it with simple materials such as would be found in your kitchen. In your office you were informed. Reporters got cracking frantically on the mental disturbance angle. So far nothing turns up. Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned, and while burning, screamed. No tip-off. No release. Nothing to quote, to manage to put in quotes. Pity the unaccustomed hesitance of the newspaper editorialists. Pity the press photographers, not called. Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned and was burned and said all that there is to say in that language. Twice what is said in yours. It is a strange sect, Mr. McNamara, under advice to try the whole of a thought in silence, and to oneself.

LXI. Of Man by Nature From God he's a Back slider, Of Ways, he loves the wider; With Wickedness a Sider, More Venom than a Spider. In Sin he's a Confider, A Make-bate, and Divider; Blind Reason is his Guider, The Devil is his Rider.